Furniture Design Ideas

Trends provide immense profit opportunities to those who read them and can leverage their power. Niall FitzGerald, of Unilever and Reuters fame, talked about trends being analogous to the ocean waves and companies as surfers, saying, “You can be the best surfer in the world. But if you sit with your surfboard on a flat […]

This is where Apple came in. In the computer industry, Apple is known as the innovator. The rest follow. Apple has consistently provided models of where the industry needs to go. Most PC manufacturers have made commodities, computers that are exchangeable parts housed in generic dark gray boxes. No wonder companies such as Gateway struggle, […]

MP3 technology was developed in the mid-1980s in Germany. All digital music, be it on CD or in MP3 format, is stored as 1s and 0s, or bits. A typical song is 32 megabytes (MB) of data, or 256,000,000 bits. A CD can store close to 800 MB, meaning 74 minutes in practice, or essentially […]

In light of the opportunities that are already here in the present, there is no reason to long for unavailable crystal ball forecasts of future prospects. The earliest work of innovation is to research existing trends and to understand them in the context of customers, because it is market dynamics that provide new opportunities that […]

A second aspect of the methods is that they are not for mass produc­tion. Thinking again of the CAD example, a tour through Houston suburbs shows that houses can be mass-produced, through replica­tion and permutation of components. But innovation is sorely lacking. The Houston suburb is no Bilbao. It isn’t the fact that these methods […]

Many of us prefer to improve ourselves and our world without risk, without uncertainty. We like step-by-step guaranteed procedures, such as those of the “________ for Dummies” books. Fill in the blank any way you want—someone has written it. You can buy Low-Carb Dieting for Dummies, Catholicism for Dummies, Guitar for Dummies, Japanese for Dummies, […]

These steps for satisficing-based product development are funda­mentally different from what we typically think of as “procedures.” Even so, they are methods, and therefore they can be learned, adopted, and used by anyone. But because of how much they differ from other procedures with which most people are familiar, we here step back from the […]

The dynamics of trends are constantly providing new opportunities in the marketplace, and the research and knowledge of key stakeholders will reveal multiple opportunities within the specified strategy area. Using an analogy, an opportunity is to a product as a problem is to a solution. The opportunity is a positive way to define a current […]

First, pick a general area of strategic importance to the company or target market. This could be a key market for your company, such as baby boomer males who run aggressively. This general area narrows down the scope of research and development, making it feasible rather than impossible. Of course, it also helps ensure that […]

The natural question, then, is how to innovate. As Peter Drucker and others have written before, innovation is not serendipity but the out­come of disciplined activity. What is the nature of that disciplined activity? What kinds of procedures can be adopted that can and will yield good ideas when so many decisions must be made—too […]