Archives for October 2013

Killing Innovation With the Traditional Approach: The Story of Best Buy’s GIFTAG

Innovation projects fail for many reasons but often times the reasons point back to a disconnect with the customer or within the company.  Sometimes the customers weren’t sufficiently ready to buy or use the new product or service.  Maybe they didn’t yet understand the benefits, they weren’t comfortable enough with the novelty, or maybe they lacked the infrastructure to take full advantage of the new product or service?  There are an equal number of examples where companies were unable to operationalize the new product or service and had to abandon it.  But sometimes new innovations fail because a company can’t get out of its own way.  The story of Best Buy and their development of the innovative gift registry platform GIFTAG is just one of those stories.

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Failure Forums: Lessons From SimonDelivers – a failure to change customer habits

SimonDelivers had launched as a online grocery delivery business in 1999 at the height of the Dot.com boom. By 2001 many of their competitors had imploded in the Dot.com bust. Miraculously SimonDelivers had managed to be one of the few that weathered the storm only to be later caught up in the real estate bust of 2008. Often times we can learn more from failures of others than from their successes. This story is a glimpse into the lessons learned from the failure of SimonDelivers.

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“Facing Failure” a New Monthly Column in Civic-Minded Publication “Pollen”

Failure knows no distinction to whether our institution is in business, government, education, or the nonprofit sector.  Facing Failure is a new monthly series that I have launched today with the civic-minded publication Pollen. The goal for this column is to bring the topic of failure to the forefront of our civic conversations in an attempt to remove the negative stigma. I intend to do this by sharing stories and the lessons learned from business, nonprofit, education, and government sector failures. The best hope for this column would be that we are able to learn from each other and strengthen our Pollen community. If you have a story that you would like to share please reach out and connect via my contact information below.

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