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Customer-orientation and vision need to complement each other in order to stimulate breakthrough innovation. A visionary approach is essential to secure long-term success as well as to provide truly differentiating offerings to the market. However, this vision cannot be defined in a vacuum without customer insights. These insights are gained through shifts in focus from solutions to needs and broad understanding of customer's context, andmarket majorities to minorities, i.e. unserved consumers with dedicated needs.This leads me to the following conclusion: Innovation based on needs of edge customers tends to result in higher likelihood of breakthroughs than involving average customers in solution development. When it comes to breakthrough innovation, a customer-centered vision seems to be indicated.

"The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds-fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself. We're not driven only by emotions, of course-we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower-and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about."

If you haven't (yet) read Coase's "The Nature of the Firm" (and you should), this article explains why his thinking in 1937 lends strong insights into the impact that digital communications technologies are having on today's organizations and markets. 

At EMC, instead of starting long e-mail threads, employees can check updates about a project on a Jive page, search for relevant materials, and download the files as they need them. Sales representatives looking for insight about a competitor can query the "competitive community" on EMC's internal social network and get an answer as they walk to a client meeting, Pappas says. The company also now uses Jive's tools externally, to augment user-support forums and to create community or "affinity" pages for clients that use EMC software.

According to a new report from Forrester, 62% of information workers in North America and Europe work remotely. The report says that many clients are approaching the firm for insight on creating best practices for remote, mobile workplaces assuming these changes are part of the remote future when in reality the change is already well underway. Previously, we looked at some of Forrester's research indicating that as much as 18% of the workforce used their personal smartphones for work, whether they were allowed to or not. That research showed only 29% of workers polled did work outside the office.

Why it may be time for IT and HR to merge (via @mitsloanexeced)

Communicopia undertook this research to better understand how non-profit leaders manage digital and online initiatives in their organizations. In our experience it's well led, well structured, and well resourced teams that are the fundamental building blocks for success online. We've gathered data from 67 senior level staff who run digital departments in non-profits and combined this with our own insights & analysis to help start a conversation in our sector about building better teams.

Despite all the headlines about billion-dollar exits and IPOs, growing too quickly or too much is not always the most desirable outcome for a startup. Fifteen entrepreneurs, members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), offer their perspective on why, in some cases, smaller means mightier.

Businesses that hoard information in their head office and keep staff in the dark on important metrics risk falling behind their competitors, according to MIT business guru Jeanne Ross. For organisations to fully benefit from this information, they need to share it with their staff, customers and business partners, she said. Once these groups get hold of such information, they can use it to take decisions that will boost the business. Customer service reps with a raft of data are more likely to be able to answer customer queries without having to refer the customer on, for example, and in the process save the company both time and money. But instead of spreading this information around, businesses have a tendency to keep it in head office and share it between a small pool of managers, who use it to run the business from the centre.