VECTERIS - Vecteris Blog Posts (10)

What Is An Urgent And Expensive Customer Problem?

I was explaining to a client the other day that the biggest mistake I see companies make when developing new products is developing a product that does not solve an urgent and expensive customer problem. Turns out he’d heard me say that before. Many times.

Why Perfectionist Tendencies Are So Bad For Innovation

It is so much easier to innovate new products or services when we stop trying to be perfect.

7 Ways To Create An Innovation-Friendly Culture

Organizations that struggle with new product innovation typically don’t fail because their leader isn’t a visionary. It’s not that the team isn't creative or smart. It's because, as humans, we favor routine. Innovation takes most of us outside our comfort zones and often requires new skills and behavior change.

Finding Joy: Applying Innovation Practices To My Life

A few years ago, I read the book Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. The book describes how to use design thinking innovation practices to help people proactively explore and change their lives to make them more meaningful. More fulfilling. More joyful.

Productization: Turning Services Into Products

Imagine you run a marketing consulting firm. The firm has a market intelligence database and data analysis methodology that it uses as part of its highly customized consulting engagements. It’s pretty lucrative.

The Top 7 Product Innovation Mistakes to Avoid in 2021

For better or for worse, 2020 has shown us how important innovation is as a core competency. Most organizations have had to engage in some type of new product innovation—whether that be creating entirely new products or features to meet more urgent customer needs or innovating existing products to be delivered virtually.

4 Tips For Making Product Investment Decisions

In this incredibly dynamic and rapidly changing environment, innovation is more complicated, but it is also vitally important for our organizations. For example, this year many of us have had to significantly accelerate digital transformation of our services, our products, and our delivery channels.

Innovate Faster and Take Action

Many times, big problems are solved with small tactics. For example, my phone chargers frequently frey at the connectors. However, a small tactic – covering the connector with the spring from inside of a pen – can prevent the frey. One broken pen saves me hundreds in new charging cords.

I spend a lot of time running Design Sprints for our clients.

Design Sprints for B2B Companies

What do Slack, IBM, McKinsey, Stanford, the City of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art have in common? They all solved urgent and expensive problems using Design Sprints - a unique process for quickly solving our customers’ urgent and expensive problems through ideation, prototyping, and testing.

Co-Create Like LEGO to Build Better Products

One of my favorite shelter-in-place binge shows has been LEGO Masters. Teams of LEGO enthusiasts compete to build original creations, and with each passing episode another team is sent home until a LEGO Master team is crowned. The show is fun, the builds are impressive and the show inspired my sons and me to haul out our tubs of LEGO and make our own new creations.

Insights on How to Productize Services and Solution Offerings