Category: The innovation blog

Tawnya Starr is the president of an American company called PrinterPresence that makes money by helping printers improve their websites. So when she says too many printers apply to a “do it cheap” mentality online, she is hardly a disinterested party. Unfortunately, she also happens to be absolutely right. Her stats suggest that 76% of print customers look online before spending  – and that’s why she recommends that printing websites enable buyers to design, personalise, proof and place their order without having to make a phone call.

Many bosses say they want innovation, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor observes, but “operate by a set of hidden principles designed to prevent innovations from surfacing or succeeding.” You can find her nine ways to kill innovation using the link below, but three struck me as particularly pertinent.

“If I had an hour to save the world,” Albert Einstein once observed, “I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions.” And yet, as Stephen Shapiro points out in the European Business Review , most businesses, as they strive to be innovative, do the exact opposite – and fail spectacularly. Shapiro cites the example of a UK bank which did the traditional thing that companies do when they want to innovate but don’t know why or how – asked staff for suggestions to improve the business.