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TINO as the Second Stage of the Innovation Process

Identify your innovation experts: The Innovation ‘Hidden Expert’ Quiz  

Who can provide me with the best innovative ideas?

Many of you are already familiar with the previous ‘restaurant as metaphor’ hidden-expert quiz, However, drawing a direct line from that conceptual ‘restaurant’ notion to a practical common business situation wasn’t always so simple.

The reasons for this difficulty are varied. Some of these have been explained in the ‘restaurant as metaphor’ post, and others exceed the scope of this post.

But while the ‘restaurant’ metaphor may seem to be only relevant ...

The challenge

Successful marketing demands the right information in order to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems. Such challenges generate a permanent flow of business questions. Some questions are commonly approached through document-based quantitative methods (data-bases, data-mining and analysis). Others are dealt with through undocumented, qualitative information, using surveys, focus groups and in-depth interviews.

Unfortunately, too often such qualitative methods fail both to explain past events and behavior and to predict accurately future trends, leaving the company relatively blind.

Such failures are usually dealt with by switching from one research method to another, or by changing its weight in ...

How to solve cross-border organizational RTV problems?

General introduction

Solving RTV problems, in which retail products are shipped back to the manufacturer for disposition, can save companies millions of dollars. Some retailers report as much as 10%-20% of products returned, while only 4%-6% may be perceived as an unavoidable cost of doing business.

Logistics professionals are always searching for innovative methods to better identify major drivers for production, packaging, storing, shipping, and warehousing malfunctions, but most efforts focus on optimizing existing knowledge and expertise.

RTV is a typical cross-organizational problem, spanning different components of the business ecosystem (manufactures ...