Innovation

The Greatest Innovations of All Time
Service Innovation: The Next Big ThingIBM, Oracle, and other tech companies have formed a new nonprofit consortium dedicated to the advancement of this hot concept.

It's all about managing complexity.Jeneanne Rae, service innovation consultant, Peer Insight. Her thought being that our lives are so complicated today, with our triple tasking everything, that any company that offers us any solution gets our loyalty and our money.
Example--how to efficiently pick a summer camp for our kids.
Example--how to efficiently pick which colleges our kids should apply to.
Example--how to efficiently pick our cell phone provider.

The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage
Pine and Gilmore take great care in defining the five economic offerings -
* Commodities
* Goods
* Services
* Experiences
* Transformations
Each level is of greater value than the prior level. Tailoring offerings to reduce customer sacrifice adds value and moves the offering up the progression of value. At the same time, offerings are continually commoditized to bring greater value going the other direction.

The distinguishing factors of each offering are explicitly defined and reinforced throughout the text. These offerings are a progression. They build upon one another. For example, at the transformation level where the customer is the offering, guiding transformations can be explained in three basic steps:

1. diagnosing aspirations, with characteristics of a service,
2. staging experiences, to bring about the transformation, and
3. follow-through, to sustain the transformation.

Towards the end a terrific thought provoker -- "Who or what does your business glorify?" What a thought provoker