Production Principles

YouTube's rapid rise in popularity can be seen around the world as one of the fastest online marketing tools to successfully grow a business. Regardless of what type of business you are in, the online benefits are amazing. So what can you do to harness this excellent online opportunity?

When we talk to people about innovation we often find that everyone in the discussion has a differing idea of what it actually means. When we are told that we ought to be innovating in order to stay ahead, surely a hard and fast meaning of innovation is important.

I recently facilitated a workshop on time management and one of the challenges my participants shared was that there is too much to do in their day-to-day lives to have the downtime that is required for getting into "creative mode." Since so much of our planning and innovation and thus effective time management, comes from brainstorming ideas then putting them into action, I thought this was a worthy topic to explore.

There is a funny one-liner joke that engineers, innovators, and inventors like to talk about when discussing future technologies in our civilization. And it goes something like this; "yah sure, and where's my flying car already?" That is a good question, and for the last three or four decades we've all been promised and assuming that by now we'd all be driving flying cars, but that's not the case.

In the world of retail there can't be many more revolutionary products than the handheld barcode scanner. The beauty of this kind of scanner is that it is so simple to use.

One of the enduring debates within the corporate world is that IT is a support function in the same way that Finance or HR are. This is something I contend is no longer true in any modern business.

I have mentioned before about the need to ensure that the input to the design process is of good quality (remember the mouldy tomatoes?) Today I would like to share with you an example of where this understanding really made a significant difference to the effectiveness of the product development activities of one company. In this particular case, the development team were going around in circles and it was taking a very long time for the project to work its way through the development process.

Finding a Story that rings true to you and conveys your vision is important. It's not as crucial to the running of your business as having a good product that does what it says on the packet. After all, if you don't have a good product, no amount of selling or marketing is going to get the customer to believe it or buy it, if it doesn't work.

The human population continues to rapidly grow. And as the number of people increase, so does the need for resources, one of which is electricity. While the need for electricity increases, the supply decreases as the available resources for electric power generation are being depleted.

Commoditization is the transition in a competitive market towards a lack of differentiation where consumer choices are based on price alone. Opinions vary towards future trends in commoditization, some believe everything will be a commodity while others believe nothing will be a commodity. This article argues that everything will become commoditized.

Innovation is being increasingly promoted as a catch-all improvement process for business. This article considers the necessary components of a viable definition for Innovation to avoid it becoming meaninglessly over-stretched in the manner of other business improvement terminology and methodology.

Consistency of change brings to the fore what is essential in a business enterprise for its healthy existence. A new business model brings forth the question of what is essential to that particular model. But, how does one know the essentials of a new business model? The answer is found by reverting back to bottom line rule.

Human minds, bodies, and souls are equipped with a highly creative ability to sense things and also act on them in ingenious and industrious ways. While we constantly interact with our environment, our creative genius lingers in the background, waiting to be activated to produce creative expressions (style) and impressions (impact). For example, when a musician plays music, how he performs that music (tempo, tone, melody, style, and selection) is his expression, while the music he produces is the impression (the feeling and emotion) he leaves with others.

Traditionally, small businesses employed national and local paper-based advertising media to promote their businesses. Unfortunately, these methods no longer render the return on investment they used to, and small business owners are left in a lurch. When statistics show that in some cases more than 85% of people surveyed rather uses the Internet when they want to inquire about local businesses, it supports what local business owners have experienced, and that is that traditional advertising methods have become seriously dated. With the advent of consumers no longer using these tradition methods of advertising anywhere nearly to the same extent, and has shifted over to online inquiries, small businesses are short-changed, and have to find alternative ways to advertise their businesses and products. Small business owners have to get their message before the eyes of their customers, or potential customers. And, if those eyes have gone mostly online, so do small businesses have to get their marketing messages online.

They say that seeing is believing, and even though we have sophisticated computers which enable a CADCAM renderings in 3-D, there is nothing like having a prototype there in front of you to discuss with the design team. By having an actual prototype in front of you, one that you can test, touch, and visualize in your mind, thus, it allows you to think of things that you might not have normally thought about. Once you see it in real life, even if perhaps it is only a model, then you can sleep on it, and think about it, using...