The Customer as a Co-Creator

Businesses often forget that the customer is the end user and they determine the success of any product, service or organization. Designing products with the customer in mind is important but using customer’s feedback in innovating those products can create higher income streams. Reaching out and asking customers for their feedback can take different forms in today’s world. 

The product development process includes ideas generation, screening of ideas, development and testing, business analysis, marketing testing and commercialization (Finch, 2012). New ideas are reviewed for feasibility and then then tested to ensure they work. A thorough analysis of the profitability and marketability of the product is conducted before mass production. 

Great ideas can come from many different locations. An often untapped source is the customer themselves. Product reviews, focus groups, and questionnaires were some of the tools to gain insight into products. As Internet technology develops new ways of collecting and evaluating customer information is beneficial. 

The process of evaluating customer preferences can be as easy as reading online and asking customers directly or as complex as conducting living labs and designing in-depth psychological experiments to understand latent factors. Collecting that information and using the feedback loop to improve products/services over time is beneficial. 

Product and service development takes time. Listening to customer needs helps to develop higher levels of understanding of consumer needs that should be funneled through product/service design to increase customer satisfaction rates. Without this input significant resources are invested into items that don’t appeal to customers and won’t generate significant returns on investment.

Finch, J. (2012). Managerial marketing. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.

Should We Expect Greater Innovation in the Future?

Will we see higher levels of innovation and skill development in the future? When entrepreneurship creates new products, it forces human capital upward as companies adapt this technology to create competitive advantages. Today's employment market is filling vacancies quickly and may soon begin to innovate again to find greater competitive strengths.

Spurts of technological advancement are followed by greater demands for market skills that raise human capital formation (Gomes, 2011). As companies adapt to new technology, they will seek to hire and train employees to use this technology. Employment expectation will adjust education and schooling to meet new job needs.

As the labor market moves closer to maximum employment capacity the cost of wages rises and pushes companies to adjust their strategies to focus on new competitive strengths. Technological advancement and integration is one approach that raises productivity and profit margins. The new demands will leave a gap in the employment market that takes time to fill.

The process of entrepreneurship, implementation, and human capital adjustments is a cyclical process where improvements in human capital can lead to greater adaptation. As businesses improve their competitiveness and hire additional skilled employees to fill vacant positions, the market becomes a draw for investment.

The development of society requires thinkers to create new ideas and spread those ideas to others where mass adaptation takes place. Today’s business world is more accustomed to innovation than at any other time in the past and will realign its educational and employment practices to encourage greater innovation. The speed of information transference will make innovation mass consumption faster thereby creating shorter product development times. Society will be in a constant process of change as innovation and skill development grow together.

Gomez, M. (2011). Stages of Economic Development in an Innovation-Education Growth Model. Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics, 5 (4).

The Power of Perceiving - The Secret of Entrepreneurship

Perception is a powerful way to create opportunities. It is so powerful that it can change lives and spark opportunities in abundance. Entrepreneurship is about perceiving differences and then capitalizing on those differences through applicable market solutions. Perception is created by years of hard work that culminates into a moment of clarity and innovative inspiration.

Entrepreneurial insight is derived from connecting lots of information together in a way that creates new products or services. This development relies on experience with the product, exploring uses of the product, and finding ways to improve the product. When education, experience, motivation come together, a new perception is created that leads to innovation.

Perception is not a passive process and requires the full engagement of the individual. Finding innovative market solutions relies on gathering and interpreting information. Information can come from formal research or experimentation with different solutions. The more someone is familiar with a product or issue, the more they can perceive areas of improvement.

Entrepreneurship actively interprets information. People assume that the body takes in information from its senses and passively records that information without interpretation. Perception is strongly influenced by experience, education, cultural values that interpret information from the body’s sensory receptors (Curry, Meyer, & McKnney, (2006). Our past experiences help us create meaningful use of information.

Two people can look at the same problem and see different solutions precisely because they are interpreting information differently. Entrepreneurs have developed cognitive models that allow them to find potential solutions through a process of connecting and deconstructing information to find similarities among elements. Reconstructing elements creates new products and services.

The problem-solving model they use is learned over years to create an effective approach. This is one reason success results from years of failure. Failure is only part of the learning process of establishing a successful model. Once the model has been developed it can be applied to many other locations with higher rates of success. Thomas Edison was invented thousands of products based upon the effectiveness of his model.

The secret of entrepreneurship rests in perceiving things in new ways and finding that which no one else has yet seen. It is a process of turning the unseen into the seen. Capitalizing on the perception requires the ability to find value in the solutions and market those solutions to others. Once an effective mental model has been built it will continue to use successful processes to detect new problems and find solutions that lead to innovation.

Curry, D., Meyer, J. & McKnney, J. (2006). Seeing versus perceiving: what you see isn’t always what you get. Professional Safety, 51 (6)

Developing Innovative Capital Through the Subconscious

Creativity leads to innovation that improves organizational functioning by solving problems. As more problems are resolved, the organization continues growing to become competitive on the market. Even though the subconscious influences creativity and problem solving, it is has been ignored as pseudo-science despite impacting almost everything in our lives; including solving business problems.

Creativity relies on our ability to resolve problems that lead to the survival of both ourselves and society. Creative people like Einstein are honored because they have the capacity to develop new solutions to long unsolved problems. Without the use of the subconscious, creativity would have never been turned into a useful form.

Problem-solving requires preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification (Grupas, 1990). A creative person studies a problem and develops a knowledge base, allows possible solutions to incubate in the subconscious, percolates a solution into a conscious form that is verified through research.

The reason the subconscious is so powerful is that it is a self-organizing system that continually makes associations/connections between information (Andreasen, 2011). As the brain builds framework for handling environmental knowledge, it also connects, categories and comes to conclusions of perplexing problems.

The speed and ability of the mind to do this is based on the intelligence level of the individual. Intelligent people are better able to process greater amounts of information and find associations faster. When put to substantial use that innovative creativity has tangible value for business that want to invent new ways of doing things.

People with creative minds don’t often think like everyone else. They use a divergent system of reasoning that creates many different solutions that are eventually pruned back to the most useful ones. This is in contrast to the general population that has been socialized through schooling to use convergent thinking that relies on step-by-step processing models already planned out by someone else.

Divergent thinking can cause difficulties interacting with people. Many intelligent people lose jobs and opportunities only because of the restrictive social circles inherent in most businesses. They may say things that are true but also run against conventional wisdom that doesn’t sit well with ego driven individuals.

Open environments that respect the diversities of people, and the way in which people process information, are more likely to develop innovative environments. Restrictive, position-oriented, highly controlled conditions will restrict innovation. By developing the right open-minded environment, a company can foster the bringing forward of subconscious ideas to develop higher forms of intellectual capital.

Intuition and Scientific Advancement Among the Gifted Population

Giftedness is a trait that comes with high intensity, motivation, love of learning and emotional sensitivities that make a person highly functional in the environment. Many countries have gifted enrichment programs to ensure that such individuals can fully contribute to the development of society. The U.S. has not fully developed their programs. Understanding the power of giftedness and their intuition that leads to career success is important in fostering their abilities for the benefit of everyone. 

Science has moved beyond the definition of giftedness and is working on better ways to select and categories giftedness for better development (Porath, 2013). Intuition is one of those gifted traits that lead to higher mastery of the environment and scientific innovation through perceiving differences within the environment. That perception matched with the rigor of scientific logic encourages new discoveries.

Intuition can be extremely powerful and can culminate in all types of useful conclusions that would have taken years with the normal investigative process.  Intuition is seen as a cognitive style that has been described as the “sixth sense” where the unconscious recognizes patterns and solutions to those patterns before the conscious mind is aware (Pearson, 2013). Such processes can be used to make accurate decisions and investigated for clarity afterwards. 

Intuition is so powerful it can do things science cannot yet explain fully. For example, intuition can lead to health choices that put cancer in remission, picking a better deck of cards for better results, and selecting items behind screens without seeing anything that would tip a person off. According to Dr. Turner book Radical Remission the body picks up on environmental cues unconsciously and makes conclusions that manifest themselves in physiological responses (Turner, 2014). 

Gifted individuals have powerful senses of intuition and logic that can lead them to unique AND innovative methods of solving problems.  According to studies on highly intelligent and creative people, gifted individuals often display a preference for either rationality or intuition (Karwowski, 2008). The style they rely on will impact how they understand and approach their world. 

Intuition among the gifted is an interesting and often unexplored trait where their biological and psychological preference matches to create unique powers of understanding and reasoning. The same skill that allows them to find new discoveries in their respective fields also leaves many unable to follow their train of thought. Gifted individuals are considered relatively rare among the population and ensuring they have the social, legal, and intellectual support/protection is important for advancing society. 

Karwowski, M. (2008). Giftedness and Intuition. Gifted and Talented International, 23 (1).

Pearson, H. (2013). Science and intuition: do both have a place in clinical decision making? British Journal of Nursing, 22 (4). 

Porath, M. (2013). The gifted personality: what are we searching for and why? Talent Development & Excellence, 5 (2). 

Turner, K. (2014). The science behind intuition. Psychology Today. Retrieved https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/radical-remission/201405/the-science-behind-intuition