Meaningful innovation is meaningful business and they mean profitable business.
My approach is to develop customer focused strategies such as Lean Six Sigma, Web Marketing, Content Management.
Why should your company bother about customer satisfaction? Why is it important to know whether your customers are really satisfied? After all in a market still largely influenced by an autoreferencing attitude towards quality (“we give you the best quality!”), caring about customer satisfaction could even be classified as “not a priority”. Sadly!
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Slingshot, re-imagine your business, re-imagine your life, by Gabor George Burt | |
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Find Your Next, by Andrea Kates | |
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Betterness: Economics for Humans, by Umair Haque | |
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Delivering Happiness, a path to Profits, Passion and Purpose, by Tony Hsieh | |
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The Progress Principle. Using small wins to ignite joy, by Teresa Amabile | |
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Enchantment, the art of changing hearts, minds and actions, by Guy Kawasaki | |
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The Thank You Economy, by Gary Vaynerchuk | |
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The New Capitalist Manifesto. Building a disruptive better business, by Umair Haque | |
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Why now is the time to CRUSH IT! Cash in on your passion, by Gary Vaynerchuk | |
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Lean Thinking, by James P. Womack | |
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The Six Sigma Revolution, by George Eckes | |
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Successful Project Management, by Rosenau and Githens | |
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Project Management, by Prof. Harold Kerzner | |
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The handbook of Project Management, by Trevor L Young |
The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income. The volume of output an economy can produce, import, export, or finance sketches only the crudest outlines of literally how well human exchange causes people, communities, society, and future generations to fare.
Simon Kuznets, 1971 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Umair Haque (among the Top 50 Thinkers) the author of Betterness* is making a great analogy between the first car was ever build and our economic system. The first car didn’t have the speedometer, but the rev counter to check whether the engine was working. In fact there was no interest to measure speed limits in a time when reaching the destination at all was the main priority. Something similar happens to our economic rev counter which is measuring "how furiously” the engine of global commerce and business is pumping, but without the speedometer we have no indicator that tells us whether all this movement that sucks both human and planet resources is generating “the motive force that lifts people from penury to prosperity”. * you can find this quote about S. Kuznets on page 12 of Betterness.
Umair Haque interviewed by Thinkers50 from HavasMediaLabs on Vimeo.
I was thinking about two key words: "to invest” and “to innovate” so I decided to check in the dictionary. I took the Oxford Advanced Dictionary (7th Edition) and found the meaning of “to invest”:
To buy properties, shares in a company in the hope of making a profit. To spend time, energy, effort on something that you think is good or useful.
I verified the same word (verb) on Thesaurus and this is what I found:
Expend money with the expectation of achieving a profit or material result by putting it into financial schemes, shares, or property, or by using it to develop a commercial venture.
This is what Thesaurus says about “Investment”:
Act of devoting time, effort, or energy to a particular undertaking with the expectation of a worthwhile result.
I finally checked the meaning of “To innovate" in the Oxford Advanced Dictionary (7th Edition) to find this:
To introduce new things, ideas or ways of doing something.
This is what Thesaurus says about “To innovate":
Make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.
It seems that “investing” and “investment” are both activities that generate an expected worthwhile result, that create something useful, that develop something possibly good. While “innovation” is the ability of the investor to profitably use elements that are available in his/her daily life to redesign, to reimagine and to improve the reality. My final thought is that the true essense of “innovation” is made primarily by the act of reimagining, rethinking our simple daily reality in a much more meaningful way. The use and the deployment of technology (software, connections, hardware, ...) should remain be the secondary element which serves and supports the act of thinking and reimagining a new meaningful way of life. If this is so, I wonder why so many companies are buying technology just to continue to do business, to produce things, to provide services in the same old way? What would be your answer?
Meaningful Innovation From The Nautical Industry
What is meaningful innovation? It's a new offer for a target audience which brings direct advantages to the producer in terms of market positioning and performances and also to the final user. These are the three principles of meaningful innovation ...