Test your startup idea

Test your startup idea and stay lean and mean. With all the talk today of insight and innovation, you’d be forgiven for feeling left out and left behind. You’re still ‘Working for the man’? not made your first million yet? you’re STILL not ‘Living the dream’?

The expectations heaped on us and our children, to innovate our way out of the economic malaise the Western world has collapsed into is relentless. Day in day out, we hear and read reports of tech city this, silicon valley that, teenage millionaires, dot-com bubbles and amazing inventions. Starting a venture yourself can seem as daunting as your first job interview, and as far away and as unlikely as a lottery win.

It’s enough to make you give up, pack a bag, run away and make thumb pots.

What people don’t talk about is how to ‘make it happen’, the practicality of ‘starting up’. Government advisers don’t tell you where to go, or of how easy and cheap it is to test your big idea, when you get the right advice and take the right approach. Instead we’re bombarded with aspirational messages extolling the virtues of doing it yourself. Where’s the practical advice? The assumption seems to be that if your idea’s good enough and you have the wherewithal as an ‘entrepreneur’, you’ll make it happen.

Just how many great ideas are lost or delayed for years because the inventor or originator didn’t have all the skills needed to get off the ground? Very few entrepreneurs are successful first time out. It can often take a series of failed ventures to build up the expertise needed to make the next one a success.

What if you could short-circuit those early failures, or at least mitigate the risk and manage the expense. Perhaps more people would begin their start-up adventure with the right set of tools and a better chance of success.

A recent concept - ‘Lean Start-up’, is gaining traction through practitioners like Ash Maurya and Eric Reis and similar and associated ideas and methodologies are gradually gaining recognition. It’s the belt and braces approach to starting a new venture - keep the costs low by any means you can. If you’re going to fail, ensure your failure costs you as little as possible so you’re able to go around and start again.

To that belt and braces approach, it’s increasingly accepted that we need to add an understanding of a customer’s needs and to ensure StartupIdea™ version 1.0, is as focused on solving a customer problem as possible. Too many ventures come off the rails too early due to an error in navigation and the setting of the wrong course. It’s imperative you’ve identified the right product solution, before investing the larger sums required to build a scalable platform, achieve market share and grow a sustainable business.

Back to the challenge of actually getting StartupIdea™ version 1.0 into the air. If you can’t write software code and design a user interface yourself, you’ll need some help. Services like TrialPilot (http://www.trialpilot.com) aim to help you navigate the maze associated with developing and testing an online idea, by ensuring time and resource is spent wisely. Transparency of costs, a fixed budget and a refreshingly short time to market mean you can strike whilst the iron’s hot and StartupIdea™ is something you enthuse about every day.

In short, if you have a great idea or grand vision, realize it before someone else does, but don’t spend more than you can afford to lose, know when to quit, and remember that when you start-up, less is more, time is money and flexibility is key.

About i

“Hello, I’m Ian and I’ve been using the internet since 1991.”

If that sounds like an admission of addiction, then perhaps it is. I’m not sure where I’d be were the internet to have gone mainstream a few years later, but my life would be very different. Despite the addiction, I have a very real non-digital life too. I’m not a “geek”, and I believe the fact I don’t live in a computer gives me a very real perspective on the internet, and more importantly what it’s future might be for real people.

In my working life, I’ve been employed at some very big companies and some very small ones. Some were start-ups, some were corporates, some were started by me, most were started by others. In that time I’ve been a pretty hopeless developer but a pretty good designer, an information architect, product manager, operations lead, technology lead, digital strategist, and have established, lead and managed innovation and prototyping teams. That breadth of experience has helped guide my decision making and ensured my strategic “visioning” has been accurate, and often significantly ahead of it’s time.

During those 20 years, I’ve kept a low profile - you won’t find much about me on-line. I’ve preferred to focus on product invention, innovation, design and delivery for the company I’ve been working for, and not spout or shout my ill-formed opinions. Recently though, I’ve come to realise that my insight and visioning is not only valuable and well judged, but could be both interesting and useful to others. So, I’ve decided it’s time to share some of the insight and vision I have for and into the many ways we have, can, do and will use the most marvelous, empowering invention of my generation.

This blog, “i is for insight”, is that place. Enjoy, digest or disregard.

Ian

Is insight the light?

Is insight the light at the end of a tunnel?
Problem solving is a journey, and on that journey, insight is the end of the beginning, but without the right direction that journey can become confused and the participants - lost.

What is insight?
As you would expect, the Oxford English dictionary offers us a definition, explaining insight as:
“the capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of someone or something.”

Wikipedias discourse reads:
“Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect in a specific context. Insight can be used with several related meanings of insight

• A piece of information
• The act or result of understanding the inner nature of things or of seeing intuitively, in Greek called noesis
• An introspection
• The power of acute observation and deduction, penetration, discernment, perception called intellection or noesis
• An understanding of cause and effect based on identification of relationships and behaviors within a model, context, or scenario (see artificial intelligence)

An insight that manifests itself suddenly, such as understanding how to solve a difficult problem, is sometimes called by the German word Aha-Erlebnis. The term was coined by the German psychologist and theoretical linguist Karl Bühler. It is also known as an epiphany.”

I don’t agree that deriving insight into a problem leads naturally or immediately to a solution, though perhaps my problem with that assumption is the nature of the time between one and the other. Certainly, the solution to a problem may manifest itself rapidly in some cases but take much longer in others.

My interpretation of ‘insight’ is that of a problem identified and understood, and I believe it’s important to draw a distinction between this and arriving at one or more solutions. My understanding of the problem solving process wasn’t always so distinct though. It took a wise and talented colleague at eBay some years ago to help me realise the key to all problem solving is in understanding the problem and the nature of that problem - the insight bit… Since then, my capability to ideate, innovate and invent in an efficient, effective manner has blossomed.

What is ‘i is for insight’?
I’ve spent most of my life, like all of us to one degree or another, asking questions and solving problems. We all do this on a daily basis - it’s why we’re so successful as a species. A healthy proportion of us then specialise, whereupon our question asking and problem solving becomes more focused and successful.

My area of ‘specialisation’ is technology and the communication and connections empowered by the internet. My particular interest is in how that tech and the ‘net can be used or applied in solving real problems and in creating new opportunities, though i’m not averse to thinking around hardware solutions where appropriate.

Innovation and invention are words that have become increasingly common in everyday conversation. They speak of our need to make progress, however both are marooned, cast adrift or lost without the direction and focus imparted through insight. My goal is to share some of the insight i’ve gained over 20 years, and iisforinsight.com is where i’ll do it.

What can you learn from ‘i is for insight’?
I’m hoping, anticipating even, that all, some or even just a little of the opinion posted here provides you with something useful, interesting or entertaining. You may disagree with some aspects of my point of view, but that’s the beauty of opinion.

As regards insight; don’t forget the importance of accurately identifying the problem before attempting to solve it and don’t jump headlong into ideating or visioning. Ensure you think, research and question first. Insight is understanding the problem not solving it.

In short, remember that everything begins with insight, and that insight begins with an i.

© Ian Jordan, i is for insight

History, things & value

How does knowing the history of a ‘thing’ alter its value?

There are several things to consider when answering this question; what constitutes the history of a ‘thing’? What 2nd hand things are we thinking about and what do we mean by value, perceived or otherwise…? I’ll get to these in a minute, but first the reasons for posing the question in the first place. Value is something I’ve been considering in a work context for some time. Having bought and sold on eBay since 2000, worked there for 6 1/2 years, and spent the last 2 1/2 at Europe’s biggest car auction-house, the question of what delivers value for a customer who is buying a used item, comes in many shapes and sizes, and I clearly have ‘previous’ in considering the question. However, it was only recently after running a successful set of personal sales on eBay that the question coalesced sufficiently for me to consider writing something about it.

What constitutes the history of a ‘thing’?
The history of anything consists of knowledge of the life of the ‘thing’ - be it a living organism, an inanimate object or a concept or idea, between the point in time it was conceived, created or first considered and the point in time from which we are looking back. A person’s history might include information about their relationships and events that had happened to them, essentially who and what. A car’s history might include a record of the numbers of owners or drivers, the miles driven, service history, accidents and repairs. The history of a concept or idea could include details of the individuals involved in its conceptualisation and development, as well as the actual development and evolution of that concept.

There are some common themes here. The history of anything we care to document or consider would seem to include information about the associated individuals, and the events that occurred and influenced the condition of the “thing. We’re back at relationships and condition then, and perhaps because as humans we imagine the universe as it relates to us (being a pretty self-centered bunch), relationships are an important part of a ‘things’ history.

No history would be complete though without a sequence of events. Whether it’s a new relationship or a change in physical condition that is recorded, we need to know the location in time and space in order to understand the context. So a history comprises relationships and events, and a timeline provides context through recording the position in time and space. The most apposite one line definition I could find online reads “History is the story of the human experience”.

What ‘things’ are we considering?
So if the history of a ‘thing’ is its story as it relates to the humans who came into contact with it, how does that manifest itself in words and pictures? The value and age influence the relative importance of relationships and events when considering the history of a given ‘thing’. Whilst it might appear that the value of the history of a ‘thing’ would vary depending on the nature of the ‘thing’ in question, in reality, history is important for every item, be it new or used. For example:

1. A well preserved 500 year old house.
   The condition of the building is of vital importance here, more so than the number of bathrooms and the exact acreage of the garden. The condition is a direct consequence of the care taken by the current and previous owners. For this particular “thing”, the relationship between the house and the people who have been connected with it will clearly have had an impact on the condition and quality of the fabric of the building, as will that of the individual trades-people engaged with repairs and upgrades over the course of the property’s history.
   
   
2. A slightly used 5 week old pencil.
   Whilst the condition of the pencil in question is paramount there are still some unknowns, and knowing a little of the history of the pencil could provide an insight into the value proposition offered by the writing instrument - in essence, understanding the likely care bestowed upon the pencil might give some insight into the reliability of the pencil in future use. Whilst this sounds absurd, a pencil is just a pencil after all, if the previous owner took little care of the pencil perhaps by dropping it repeatedly, the graphite core could be fractured throughout its length. I haven’t used a pencil for some time, but I remember the frustration of having the lead fall out due to internal fractures.
   
   
3. A newly released, unused digital camera.
   Here’s the interesting example. Whilst knowing the history of a ‘thing’ when’s it’s got a history is easy to understand, how does knowing the history of something that doesn’t have a history help us? The answer is again in understanding what constitutes ‘history’. Looking at it from a human perspective, whilst the item itself is new, the manufacturer or creator of the concept likely isn’t. We’re into ‘track record’ territory here, but by appreciating that any track record is built through the actions of one or more individuals, we can understand the value of that history and apply it to a new product, we’re back into asking the question - do they care, are they trustworthy, reliable and honest? In short, we’re likely to pay more for a newly released digital camera made by Nikon than that from a ‘no-name’ brand with a poor reputation.

What do we mean by value?
I’ve talked about what history is and what it tells us, but why and how do we apply that understanding? Assuming we’re looking to acquire a ‘thing’ or to accept an idea, understanding the history and therefore the associated human relationships helps us judge the value proposition. “Should I buy that thing?” and “Should I believe that proposition?” are the questions we ask ourselves daily. Understanding the history behind the ‘thing’ or idea informs our opinion, gives us insight and helps us make the best decision.

So what can we conclude? And why did my eBay sales perform so well?
For some items the history and provenance of the item itself is what adds value and for others it is in knowing something about the previous keepers. The feedback system that eBay pioneered is useful in identifying whether a seller is likely to be trustworthy and reliable, but there are many other indicators that would help with identifying whether a particular ‘thing’ is a good bet or a potential time bomb based on who the current and previous owners have been.

It’s all about care - can you trust your own eyes, or do you need to know more? The care taken by previous owners of an item will largely dictate the condition of that item. My buyers on eBay clearly felt reassured by my 1000+ positive feedback and the transparency I provided in my descriptions, and consequently were prepared to pay the higher than average asking prices I demanded.

So, in my experience, knowing the history of a ‘thing’ and through it something of the character of the owner/s does increase that ‘things’ perceived value.

© Ian Jordan, i is for insight

The 5 S’s of finding

The internet is big…
…really, really big, and finding things is one of, if not the main activity, performed by most of us online. This finding activity hopefully leads to a satisfactory or rewarding outcome, but not always and that’s likely to be due to the method we choose (consciously or unconsciously) to find what we’re looking for.

Finding things is important, you only have to recognise the success of Google, and before it, Webcrawler, Alta Vista and Yahoo! to appreciate the importance of  search. This article examines the reasons why people search for the things they do, and the mechanisms they employ when doing so.

1. What influences our choice of finding metaphor or mechanism?
People are all different and do things in different ways. When it comes to finding things online, we all go about this seemingly simple task differently. There are many variables that influence a user’s choice of search or ‘finding’, some of the most important include:

i. Confidence
New and less confident internet users tend to accept recommendations more readily and often browse directories, images or links, whilst experienced, more confident searchers tend towards a more focused approach.

ii. Category
Where using filters or a structured text search to locate a specific search target is easier than for something poorly defined, browsing works better where there is some ambiguity around the target specifics. Finding an Apple iPhone requires the searcher to define very few options, however locating the ‘right’ leather jacket requires many more variables to be filtered, and a visual ‘browse metaphor’ might be more appropriate. Where the searcher is not familiar with the category, an appeal for recommendations might help start the finding process.

iii. Urgency
Where time is of the essence, a searcher may tend towards a more direct approach to finding, such as using keyword search or attribute filtering. Whilst this may be at the expense of appropriate yet marginal search results, the user may not be minded to consider peripheral results based on specifics (E.g., price or colour). Where a timely result is required, focused search is often more appropriate than a more leisurely browse. However once again, recommendations from trusted sources may help avert indecision.

iv. Importance
When searching for something important, a considered approach using multiple finding metaphor is likely to be employed. A searcher may begin with a recommendation before browsing directories or vague search results in order to filter the various options. This finding experience may conclude with a price- influenced search using a tightly focused search or filter approach.

2. How do we find the things we’re looking for?
The reasons for choosing a particular finding metaphor may not be conscious, but the result of a combination of circumstances. Regardless of the reasons or circumstances, when it comes to finding something online there are five metaphors, methods or mechanisms and they all begin with ‘S’…

i. Searching
The method we’re all most familiar with now, thanks largely to Google’s work in both simplifying and improving the effectiveness, is the text search. We have come to expect an appropriate set of results to be returned after typing in one or more words. This in itself is remarkable and testament to the advances in the algorithmic approach to interpreting a search term or phrase, as opposed to the matching method employed by early search ‘engines’.

An alternative search method employed where metadata is concise and abundant, is through selecting pre defined filters to build a structured search term. The filtering method allows a very precise set of results to be returned, with filter options often managed dynamically and dictated by the contents of the database being searched.

E.g., A text search on Google for “Jeans Levi boot cut blue”.

ii. Surfing
Both text search and structured filtering represent options for searchers with a good idea of what they are looking for. For those who are perhaps unsure, willing to be influenced or who wish to take their time and take a more considered approach to reaching a finding resolution, the concept of surfing or browsing is a more suitable method. Often used in conjunction with another finding mechanism, the searcher will skim or surf through a broad set of results, browsing through the results until a suitable target is found.

Results to be browsed may take the form of text links, descriptions or images, and whilst the method may seem vague and unfocused, it is one approach to fine tuning a broad set of results.

E.g., Browsing an online marketplace, filtering by clothing type, label, style and colour.

iii. Suggestions
System initiated suggestions, or ‘suggestion engines’ are an important part of most people’s online experience. The concept that ‘These are things that other people like you looked at, and may therefore be of interest to you’, can add huge value to an online experience. Suggestions can be derived from product or service attribute matching (E.g.,You searched for blue jeans, would you be interested in a denim jacket?), or alternatively, through identifying trends in user type (E.g., Someone with a similar demographic profile to you also looked at this denim jacket). A third type of suggestion can be based on similarities in search or browse activity (E.g., You’ve been looking at blue jeans. Other people who looked at the same blue jeans as you, have also looked at this denim jacket and this leather belt).

These suggestions are based on data. They may not always be relevant to an individual but in most cases will enhance the searcher’s experience and whet their appetite for extending their search into new areas. There is a downside in that sometimes suggestions may seem inappropriate, may be distracting or might appear as unsolicited advertising which many people react negatively towards. However there is no dispute that for many, system-generated suggestions are hugely useful in surfacing things you didn’t know you wanted or were interested in.

E.g., Whilst searching an online marketplace for clothes, the system displays a photograph of a pair of blue jeans alongside a denim jacket and a leather belt.

iv. Social
Social is another form of recommendation-based finding mechanism though it is different enough from machine suggestions to warrant it’s own category. Where suggestions are generated from rules using data harvested through user activity, social recommendations come from people who know a little more about you than a machine using its interpretation of your likes and dislikes from stored data. Our friends, family, colleagues and even acquaintances can make judgements about the things we might be interested in from a fraction of the data a machine requires. These recommendations are often derived from insight that AI systems are many years or decades away from achieving.

The thing about recommendations from friends is that they may be made for reasons not entirely analogous to our reasons for searching. Recommendations may be made to influence an action, to prove a point or position, or to justify the recommender’s choice or ‘good taste’. They may of course be made for the right reasons as well, but regardless of the intent, recommendations carry a great weight as the searcher may often feel obliged to accept and act on the recommendation. Whilst sometimes useful, recommendations can be a powerful suggestive force but one that doesn’t always lead to the best outcome or result.

E.g., A friend emails you about a great deal on a pair of Levis, and knowing how you spilt paint on your favourite denim last week suggests you should replace them with a new pair - ‘Honestly, they’re a great buy and they’d look great on you!’.

v. Stumbling
Where surfing implies focused-browsing, stumbling is a more haphazard, less controlled method of finding. To stumble is to trip over things, and implies a vague methodology and goal. Often the searcher begins looking for something in an unstructured fashion, and through a number of jumps, finds themselves in a completely unrelated place. Stumbling is perhaps the least efficient way of finding anything, but sometimes when we’re sitting lounging on our sofa, iPad in one hand, glass of Chablis in the other, it’s the most relaxing finding strategy, sometimes yielding the most surprising results.

E.g., You go online looking for advice on a new camera, but through a series of unrelated clicks on links and adverts, you arrive at a a website selling half price designer jeans.

3. What does this mean for you, your website, your audience and the future?
So, finding things. Pretty important to all of us, pretty much everyday and during pretty much every trip we take online. We all behave differently depending on our goals and the circumstances of our ‘being online’, but the goal of finding things is common.

In a perfect world, every time we searched for something, we’d find it in the right colour, size and at the right price, from a retailer who will deliver it in the next hour to our front door. In that perfect world, every online product or service would allow each user to find things in the manner of their choosing. In reality, this can be costly and cause untold user experience confusion. A satisfactory compromise would be to provide an intuitive text search supported by a suggestion engine.

The reality is that the tools aren’t, and the infrastructure isn’t available yet to ensure a perfect finding experience every time, and it may be some years before they are. The internet and the content available through and across it, is just too big and too dynamic to index effectively.

One day, our personal search ‘agents’ or ‘servants’ (searchvants?) will receive an instruction from us and will head off across the ‘net looking to satisfy our request. Each agent will talk to other agents and update information storage nodes whilst it looks for it’s target. Within milliseconds or minutes, it will return with it’s answer, and one day that answer will be the one you’re looking for - every time of asking…

© Ian Jordan, i is for insight

Typing to swiping…

Bricks to clicks and typing to swiping - innovating in an established business

A much used phrase in the early 2000s, ‘Bricks to clicks’ said a lot about how older companies were beginning to recognise the importance of establishing a presence within the growing ranks of online service and e-commerce websites. Perhaps more relevant now is how an established business can cater to smartphone and tablet users - clicking and typing has become ‘tapping and swiping’.

However the challenges involved in facilitating change in a ‘business with history’ are the same as ever they were - no business can stand still. Where in the 1990s and early 2000s the internet and the increased availability of affordable PCs and laptops fundamentally altered the way businesses interact with their customers, now it’s the abundance of smartphones and the growing use of tablets that is once again challenging accepted conventions, and forcing businesses to question their strategies for interfacing with customers.

In 2000, an established business was likely one with actual shops. Their growing challenge involved competing with the new breed of online retailers without shops and consequently with lower overheads. John Lewis survived and prospered, HMV has struggled and many others have fallen by the wayside. Those same upstart companies who frightened the established ‘brick’ businesses then, are in many cases the ones who are facing challenges from new upstarts now. The need to innovate was ever thus - never ending. Languishing on one’s laurels has always been the start of a businesses demise and never more so than now when the commerce and service landscape changes so quickly, and on such unpredictable tangents.

Through my career, I’ve been fortunate to work in both cutting edge new media businesses and established companies with an enlightened sense and understanding of their goals and competition. There are however many companies who have recently recognised their imminent problems and predictable demise late in the day. These are the companies that need to, and in many cases are addressing their shortcomings by engaging in visioning and innovation as a means of catching and where possible  overtaking their competition.

Where a culture of innovation is not baked into the soul of a company, there are many obstacles to overcome in establishing the innovation process of insight, problem acceptance, solution visioning, prototyping, trialling, assessment and graduation. These obstacles are born in the bed of comfort; they mature in the comfort of inertia, and then grow insurmountable as the tide of denial sweeps in. These obstacles are simple to identify yet hard to overcome, but when overcome, progress can be swift and the results empowering for a business in many ways.

Obstacles standing in the way of innovation:

1. Insight - Understand the problem.
Not knowing there is a problem doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, yet many people in older businesses don’t see the importance of understanding their customer’s needs. Customer insight is the starting point for all innovation, yet where there is no recognition of the importance of evidence in decision making, there will be a consequent lack of interest in generating and employing insight. Get people interested in surveys and metrics, then identify a small number of KPIs and track them. When everyone shares the same KPIs, a business or team can move forward together.

2. Problem acceptance - Accept the problem exists.
Once you have the insight and recognise there’s a problem, you have to accept it. We’re bad at this generally as it’s essentially admitting a failure, however accepting something is wrong, broken or flawed is essential if we’re to fix it. If the insight says there’s a problem, there likely is.

3. Solution visioning - Identify solutions to the problem.
Now we know what the problem is, we need to identify potential solutions. A culture of ‘can’t do’ or ‘too hard’ will hinder progress here, however employing cross functional teams with representation from all areas of the business to identify one or more solutions will move things on quickly. The right solution can often come from the most unlikeliest contributor so recognise that everyone’s ideas and views are valid.

4. Prototyping - Make or build the solution.
Whether it’s a new process or a product, in order to test a solution, we need a prototype. The biggest hurdle I’ve found in the past is in the business not allocating resource to prototyping. Whether its cash for outsourcing or ring fencing a percentage of key resource, without that commitment, a prototype isn’t going to be forthcoming. It’s where I find most frustration develops. You know what the problem is and you know how to fix it, but can’t get the resource to finish the job. Often it may require a high level view of the likely return on the investment of building a prototype, however in more enlightened organisations, innovation or invention prototyping stands on it’s own as pure research and development. Remember that in most cases, R&D can be declared and written off against a companies tax liability, so remember that a business case detailing a positive return on investment shouldn’t be seen as the only justification for committing resource to prototyping.

5. Trialling - Testing the solution.
This is where the doubt sets in and people get cold feet. Is the solution the right one? What will customers think of it? Will it hurt the business. Whilst at eBay, some of the smartest people I worked with agonised over decision making for months when the correct answer would present itself in verifiable data after a short live trial. No theory, no guesswork, just empirical evidence to support a decision one way or the other. Testing the solution prototype is fundamental - think of it as added insight. Testing with small numbers of customers in a controlled fashion is often the best way to go, but enough people have written about the value and procedures for A-B testing and I shan’t go into it here.

6. Assessment - Assessing the success of the solution.
Once the trial is completed, you need to assess the results. This can take us back to stage 1 of the process of innovation - looking at the insight. Get people excited about this stage of the process - it’s the point at which ideas and decisions are vindicated and should be the most exciting part of the process. Whilst it can present the ugly truth that the solution was wrong or the implementation flawed, it will tell you what you do next…

7. Graduation - Do you deploy, modify, rebuild or kill the solution?
Perhaps the solution was right first time, perhaps it needs modifying slightly to improve the results, maybe it will need another trial to validate any changes. If the prototype was built quickly in order to test a concept, perhaps it will need rebuilding to make it more fit for purpose, or perhaps there is no future for this particular solution and the team needs to recognise this and move on, perhaps restarting the process. Whatever the decision, whether it is graduation to a full time part of the businesses operations, or an ignominious footnote in the company history, the process of innovation has run it’s course and every outcome should be seen as a positive. Not doing something when the decision is founded on insight and experience is as successful an outcome as using a proven solution for all your customers’ benefit.

Identify these obstacles in your organisation and choose the path you’ll use to negotiate them. Innovation should be part of every businesses thinking and practice, but it’s important to understand why and how you’re going to do it. From the outset, it’s important that everyone understands it may be ‘throw-a-way’ work, but start from that position and you’ll be managing peoples expectations appropriately.

Every business is in effect an established business when it comes to innovation, and so it’s important to remember that insight and innovating should be seen as an essential part of every businesses strategy and day to day practice. Without it, complacency, stagnation and contraction will likely ensue…

© Ian Jordan, i is for insight