Differentiation in a Tough Economic Climate

Here's some good advice on refining the scope of your target market, honing your message, perfecting your products, and engaging your customers in a positive and refreshing way. ...

... "If you can become known by a very narrow target market for doing something very specifically unique in a way that your customers adore, you will no longer compete on price and no longer live at the mercies of the ups and downs beyond your control. " ...

Via Escape from Cubicle Nation: Recession-proofing wisdom

Design's Differentiating Power

HP's design practice helps the company to differentiate itself in the marketplace and be more efficient by leveraging the talent across its business lines. ...

... "Hurd gave his backing to Lucente's plan to ramp up the companywide design practice. These days, conventional wisdom holds that good design is indispensable for differentiating products, building brands, and forging new markets. " ...

Via Fast Company: Design's Role in HP Transformation

It's Magic: Challenge Those Assumptions

Andy Cohen shows us a few tricks that will aid in our ability to challenge assumptions to differentiate and innovate. ...

Project Goal Alignment

Aligning your project to goals is necessary to properly position the project for success. Sharing that understanding of the alignment across your team provides insights that otherwise may not be clear to IT staffers - helping them to improve their strategic perspective of the business. ...

... "Whenever you're uncertain about the bottom-line why of an IT project, refresh your knowledge of the company's priorities and goals by talking to your manager. A big-picture perspective is a prerequisite to making meaningful contributions to your firm. " ...

Via Computerworld Australia: Differentiate Yourself in IT

Project Delivery Speed

Getting good at delivering project on-time? Try speeding them up and accelerating the time to value ... for a potential competitive differentiator. ...

... "It is cause for alarm then that so many of those surveyed deliver IT projects late. Companies who succeed in accelerating IT project and service delivery have an advantage, while those who do not suffer at the hand of the competition. " ...

Via SAP INFO: Project Speed

Cloud Computing For Hyperscale DataCenters

Dell makes move up-market to compete more directly in the data center big-leagues. Can it differentiate itself?

... "Dell's Cloud Computing Solution is designed to provide data center optimization, increased energy efficiency, and lower deployment and overall management overhead for customers whose IT infrastructure, or compute cloud, is the factory for their business. These data-intensive customers include major providers of goods and services over the Internet, financial services organizations, national government agencies, institutional university and laboratory environments and upstream petroleum producers. " ...

Via Dell: Dell Announces Cloud Computing Solution to Address Unique Needs of Hyper-Scale Data Centers

Personal Brand: Your Value-Add

Hugh Macleod explores the concept of the unique personal currency that each of us brings to the table. How do you differentiate yourself and add value in your marketplace with your micro-brand? ...

... "Whatever business you work in, whether you're an employee or have your own business, you have a currency that you trade in. " ...

Via Gaping Void: Personal Currency

CIO Expectation: Efficiency

CIOs are expected to run an efficient and highly-available IT utility. Differentiation is the key to the CIO success system. Can the IT organization move to a strategic relationship with the business and differentiate itself from peers? ...

... "And second, that CIOs don't get rewarded for running an efficient utility. " ...

Via Koch CIO Blog: Link

Strategic Value: Measuring the Human Resource Function ...

Craig Schneider, CFO Mag, explores the tactics needed to create differentiation in the human resource function. Metrics are needed to establish a foundation of value. Partnering with the finance function is seen as a way to accelerate the measurement initiative. A quantitative approach should be balanced with the art of "resources human", since people and talent should not always be boiled down to a number. ...

... "The human-resources department is in survival mode. As outsourcing the function becomes a more-prevalent option for companies, HR managers know that if they are going to endure, they have to deliver strategic value, and that value has to be measurable. " ...

Strategic Value: Measuring the Human Resource Function: The New Human-Capital Metrics: Via CFO

CIO Drives Enterprise Architecture Standardization and Best Practices: A Common Theme ...

CIO drives standards and best practices to moderate IT spending to acceptable percent of sales. A recurring theme. Where's the innovation or differentiation? ...

... "In terms of governance and best practice that means things like the introduction of the Prince 2 project management principles, IT information library (ITIL) guidelines for IT infrastructure and BS7799 certification for security. " ...

CIO Drives Enterprise Architecture Standardization and Best Practices: A Common Theme: Via silicon.com: United Business Media CIO Matthew Graham-Hyde ...

Sustaining Innovation: Growth Through Creativity ...

Creativity fuels the innovation engine. How can we increase creativity to accelerate innovation? What are leadership principles necessary to drive growth through the creative organization? Here are some great insights ... Marc Babej provides excellent summary of Peter Georgescu, Young & Rubicam, on sustainable innovation from the Fortune Innovation Forum. Peter emphasizes three points on innovation: Embrace creativity, emphasize human values, and support active involvement in investing in future generations through education. Creativity is seen as a core enterprise competency that requires a special type of leadership to cultivate and sustain. ...

Via Being Reasonable: Peter Georgescu on Sustaining Innovation ...

... "First, embrace creativity as the most vital enterprise resource. The only leverageable asset on a company's balance sheet. Creativity is the cure for lack of differentiation, and in turn it begets profits. It's an inexhasutible resource, but also fragile. Creative output requires a new type of leader, one who refuses to manipulate or manage through fear. " ...

David Tanner, Tanner & Associates, Inc., discusses harnessing and increasing the creative capability in a research and development environment. These techniques should apply to most innovation scenarios. ...

Via Winston Brill: Creativity and Innovation in R&D ...

... "It's vital to set aside quality time specifically for people to learn the techniques of creative thinking. This first step satisfies an essential criterion for cultural shift - that is, it gives status to the effort. What resources can you use to focus on this subject? In-house seminars, books and articles on creativity, and outside creativity experts. " ...

Ben Simonton expands on the leadership techniques necessary to increasing the enterprise creativity competency ...

Via Corante: What Drives Innovation?. IdeaFlow: Discussion about innovation and creativity -- new products, strategy, open innovation, commercialization of technologies, patents, idea generation, customer input in the NPD process, more.

... "The brain controls creativity, innovation, productivity, motivation and commitment. I will attempt to explain a superior leadership strategy which turns on brains to the maximum extent and thus greatly enhances innovation. ... A superior leadership strategy inspires people to do more, dream more and learn more. We all know that people are our most important asset and that the best ones are self-motivated self-starters. Unfortunately, only 5% or so are naturally that way. A superior leadership strategy is capable of making the vast majority of employees self-motivated self-starters who are highly committed and highly productive, up to 300% more so than if poorly motivated. So what is this strategy? " ...

Innovation Metric: The UnBalanced Scorecard ...

Balanced scorecards enable an enterprise to measure performance against its strategy. With innovation on the mind of most companies today, what metrics can support and sustain innovation? Geoffrey Moore shares insightful comments on shifting the balance of emphasis to clear areas of differentiation to create an imbalance in the marketplace and sustain that imbalance for competitive advantage. ...

Innovation Metric: The UnBalanced Scorecard: Via Dealing_with_Darwin: Unbalanced Scorecards, Please ...

... "I think they should call for an unbalanced scorecard, not a balanced one. Our work in innovation makes clear that unless companies differentiate beyond the norms of the competitive set in which they participate, they cannot get paid a differential return. " ...