Who will pay for Frozen Food Innovation?

December 28, 2008 · Posted in competition, mindset, strategy · Comment

When looking for prospective clients I ask the question, “how many direct innovations are available?” I personally prefer indirect innovations but it’s much easier for new clients to understand and accept direct ones. This makes my value to the client more apparent so they are happy.

So I recently came across contact information for an executive of a company that makes frozen foods. I plugged a little information into the Predictive Innovation Method and in 2 minutes came up with one extremely valuable direct innovation for that industry and a simple way to make it. This innovation could save the company millions of dollars, possibly save lives and be a great product differentiator.

Even better this innovation has been publicly available for over 20 years. No R&D is needed. Plus there is an even better improvement to the idea that they could release later.

So now my question is, how do I make money from this? One way is to hint that I know something that will save the company money and could be used as a brand differentiator and possibly prevent serious legal damages. Then hope they will pay me to tell them.

That doesn’t sound very promising. But maybe I could offer the same information to all the competitors in the market, maybe that would increase my chances of success. There are about five big brands I could try. Maybe I can increase the urgency by telling each that I am making the offer to competitors.

Or I can employ my favorite type of innovation, the indirect alternative. I can approach attorneys for food born illness cases and tell them that I have proof these companies deliberately did not take reasonable measures to protect the health and safety of people eating their food. This information would likely drastically increase damages possibly being worth millions of dollars.

The information is worth exactly the same amount to the attorney’s as it is the food company but it costs the attorneys much less to act on the information. The food companies need to change their manufacturing process, plus the small cost to each item. The attorney’s only need to present the information in court or a settlement meeting. And the fact that the food companies made an economic decision to risk the health and safety of the public would be very damaging in a court case especially if the media reported on it. That type of information would make the attorney’s job much easier.

If you are paying attention you will see that I can find many other types of people who could benefit from this innovation or just knowledge of the innovation.

Short list of types of customers for the innovation:

Suppliers of the actual innovation (at least five)
Shippers of the food (at least one for each frozen food company)
Stores that sell the food (at least 5 major companies)
Companies handling non-food frozen items (hundreds)

You might also realize that I can make money from all of the possibilities. The possibilities aren’t OR each one is an AND. So I turned that one opportunity into over 20. That is a possible increase of return on investment of 2000%

This type of strategy is only possible if you can reliably generate focused innovations on demand. Notice that I did not do an Intellectual Property expansion on this innovation. The Predictive Innovation Method reveals there are at least 105 different ways to achieve the same result of that one innovation. So if either of those potential customer’s want to pursue the innovation I can quickly find the lowest cost lowest risk way to achieve the highest profit.

Let’s see who will Pay for It.

Tags: business strategey, food, increasing profits, new markets, reducing risk, return on investment

Google Predicted the Election

November 6, 2008 · Posted in competition, innovation · Comment

As I pointed out in my book “Ron Paul Revolution: History in the Making” Google trends is much more accurate measure of the public opinion than limited polls. Since Google searches are what people are really interested in and can’t be swayed by the wording of the questions it’s more truthful. Also Google searches tracks every search so it is not as prone to sample bias.

Google Trends for Obama and McCain

I believe the polling methods used are part of the reason the Republican party failed. And even though the election looks like a big win for Obama and the Democrats I suspect they are missing very important aspects of what happened. Looking at people as groups rather than individuals hides what is really going on. People act as individuals not groups. Individuals have very different needs and desires. The entire election process forces people to pick a watered down version of what they really want.

There are enough people who don’t vote to win an election. That is the unserved long tail majority. In politics it might be possible to ignore the real majority by fighting over pieces of the small pie but businesses can’t do that and succeed. That huge group of potential customers are fuel for disruptive innovation. Any company that reaches that untapped group will jump to the industry leader.

Old methods of polling and marketing research won’t find these hidden non-buyers. Predictive Innovation can show you the untapped markets and how to reach them. As more distributed tools like Google Trends become available it becomes more important to learn how to use the Predictive Innovation Method.

Tags: election, google trends, marketing, mccain, obama, polls, predictive innovation

Finding Gold in the Closet at the Detroit Economic Club

February 25, 2008 · Posted in business, competition, economics, innovation, productivity, strategy · Comment

Today when I attended the presentation by Gary Shapiro to the Detroit Economic Club I uncovered opportunities that were being overlooked. Mr. Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronic Association, encouraged Detroit to embrace free trade agreements and use innovation to meet the challenges of increasing competition. He was absolutely correct, however as so many others beating that drum, he failed to explain how to innovate. Many of the attendees left feeling even more pressure.

Oddly enough, everyone of the people I spoke to were using the same failing approach to competition and every single one was overlooking huge profits from using resources they already own. Profits from things they currently considered expenses.

Two companies I spoke with were trying to improve efficiency in hopes of lowering prices. The first was a tool and die company that was implementing 6 Sigma to find ways to improve process efficiencies. This is a good thing. I was one of the founders of using statistical process control (SPC) in the USA back in the 1980s. If the company was typical they could expect 10-30% improvements. This would make many managers very happy. But they were actually wasting their time and energy. They had 4 very expensive machines sitting idle. They were probably losing $400,000 per year in missed revenue. More importantly if they just made $1 more from those machines it would be INFINITE improvement in efficiency. They are currently getting zero efficiency. The machines are collecting dust and wasting space. Any money they make from those machines is infinite increase in efficiency.

Tags: business, CES, Consumer Electronics Association, Detroit, Detroit Economics Club, economic, Gary Shapiro, gold, innovation, insurance, manufacturing, marketing, markets, profit margins, quality, spc