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How are Trends an Innovators’ Friend?

Trias de Bes and P. Kotler in “Winning at Innovation. The A-to-F Model” present a unique, structured approach to organizing process of innovation in corporates. They distinguish different roles and responsibilities in the act of entrepreneurial discovery, one of which are creators. Creators have important role of identifying and channeling macrotrends, trends, fashions, and novelties into exploitable business opportunities. How these social proofs differ to teach other, and wat are their examples?Trias de Bes and P. Kotler argue that many inventions turned to be failures as they didn’t took current trends into account. Therefore the authors recommend reflection on macrotrends, trends, fashions and novelties deriving from sociological research to exploit business opportunities embedded in them

The basic distinction between macrotrends, trends, fashions, and novelties is how long they are expected to last.

In the example of macrotrends, they last from minimum 5 years up to 10 years, however it is rare that they’d last over 10 due to changes of priorities and life purposes of generations. Examples of macrotrends include usage of smartphones, digitalization of newspapers, or increase of ecologic awareness.

Trends last from minimum 1 year up to 5 years, and can relate to phenomena such as smart gardening, social media, or electronic vehicles.

Fashions are something that last minimum one season, as in case of footwear and outwear up to one year, as in example of other products and services. Fashions relate to movies of the year, book and audio bestsellers, or extremely holey jeans as in Poland in 2016.

Novelties last up to one month, sometimes even less, like a week or two. Novelties often relate to sport, cultural, political and media events. An example of novelty, in the day of writing this post, are UEFA EURO 2016 or World Youth Day being organized in Poland between July 25th-31st 2016, which will result in short time boom of sales of event related gadgets incl. souvenirs, keychains, pictures, T-shirts, or stamps.

If you pay attention, look really closely, and are aesthetically skilled you can turn macrotrends, trends, fashions and novelties into business with platforms such as Threadless, Spreadshirt, or Betabrand.

The most crucial thing in exploiting the trend is to identify them at relatively early stage of growth. So how do you do that? You can build a network of trusted observers of trends indicators, like DDB agency did in form of SignBank service, which enables adding observed phenomena to dedicated database by the agency employees from all over the world. Other sources include social media and blogs, which you can leverage using dedicated tools. One of such tools is Google Trends enabling analysis of frequency of appearance of defined search queries in Google search engine. Another one is Technorati, which enables you to browse through the blogs dedicated to particular topics and narrow down the most relevant ones. Reputation.com is the tool enabling you to follow reputation of defined people, companies and brands, incl. discussion taking place in social media. You might also like Wordle, which enables generating clouds of words from the text you provide. Worlde gives greater prominence to words that appear frequently in the source text of blogs with Atom or RSS feeds. Sentiment 140 will be interesting for those, who’d like to know positive and negative opinions published on Twitter that are related to defined word put in Twitter search engine.

Tools supportive in trends identification incl. also solutions of Appinions or Institute for the Future, which we mentioned in our previous posts.

Dzida!

What entrepreneurs can learn from James Bond?

No matter which episode of 23 James Bond movies you’ll watch there are certain things which doesn’t change in creating commander’s Bond superior advantage in fighting his opponents and rescuing the world. I believe these things are informational insights intercepted at the earliest stage possible with an idea on how to make use out of them.

In business in most of the cases we don’t have business intelligence team backing us up from the MI6 or fancy gadgets making information interception easier. It doesn’t mean we can’t have our own business intelligence providing great business value potential as early as possible, and for free of course. So how could we convert bondish secret sauce into entrepreneurship practice?

So if you are at the moment of defining what your business should be, you can:
1) Check Google Trends to know now what and where precisely is becoming “more in” and deploy Google Alerts to follow it closely

2) Check McKinsey Insights and AT Kearney’s Executive Agenda for bigger picture of changes happening on the markets, forces driving them, and opportunity they create.

If your business is about providing value within anything doing something concernig infrastructural investments you can:

1) If you operate globally register in Infrastructure Journal and check what infrastructural investments are to be done in the future, what are their budgets, and who is involved in their preparation and design

2) If you operate in the European Union register in Tenders European Daily. Check what investments will take place in the future and what are their estimated budgets. You can also use TED for market trends and market niches identification analysis

3) If you operate in Poland register in Investment’s Compass to have insights on investment’s planned in places or future nvestment’s value thresholds you are interested.

There are of course much more sophisticated tools like investments signals databases or ISI Emerging Markets Information Services (ISI), which provide superior insights but not always free of charge. If you are a student you can always check what data libraries and services are offered by your alma matter you might be surprised if it turns out that your school is giving you access to ISI, which  standard yearly subscription can cost up to EUR 1 million.

They say that driving business can become easier if you know where you are heading and who is already the race. Other bondish secret sauce ingredients have much to with managing stakeholder’s expectations and making lasting impressions we leave them with. So if you just need an ice-breaker for networking event, business meeting, teleconference, or a phone call you’ll do well providing you’ll do one of these 😉

                                                        Source: www.pinterest.com 

Dzida!