Business Innovation

- Which of the products is the most interesting to you? How do you think the company got the idea for the product?

- Imagine that you are the president of a company. You want to design a new product (an electronics product, a game, or a piece of kitchen equipment) that young people will enjoy. What kind of people would you hire to create the new product?

Meet the Innovation Experts:
Meet two of today's most successful business innovation experts. What do they have in common? They both know how to think outside the box and create success after success.

- Beth Comstock, General Electric Company: GE is most famous for its electric appliances, but GE also makes jet engines, electric motors, and much more. He wanted the people in charge of creating GE products to take risks in their thinking, but always keep the goal of increasing the company's growth. To achieve this task, the CEO put Beth Comstock in charge of making GE and its 300,000 workers more creative and innovation. One of Comstock's innovations was the "dreaming workshop". In a dreaming workshop, product designers and customers come together to talk about products that now exist only in peoples's imagination.

- Sohrab Vossoughi, ZIBA Design: The field of design research is moving fast. He uses traditional product design methods but now he has a new strategy: he tries to give customers a very emotional experience when they buy the products he designs. His research led Logitech to create a variety of new headsets that helped them expand the market for their products.

1. Why did GE hire Beth Comstock?
2. How does Sohrab Vossoughi make people want to buy the products he helps to design?
3. What are the similarities between the two people described in the article?

- They are doing market research.
- They are creating an experience for the customer.
- And a third way is that they're bringing "real people" into the company and watching how they react to (v-phản ứng lại) new products.

How did companies create new products in the past?
What are two things that innovative companies today have in common?
How did Apple come up with the idea for the iPod?
How did Starbucks use innovative thinking to bring in new customers?

1. Should companies take risks when they think of new products? What are some of the possible advantages and disadvantages?
2. What kind of strategy mentioned in the lecture would you like to try? How would you use this strategy? Explain your answer in detail?
3. Is thinking outside the box always the best way to create new product designs? Why or why not? What are the possible negative effects of always thinking outside the box?
4. Look back at your notes. What was another idea in the lecture that you found important and interesting? Tell the class why you think it is important or interesting and ask for their opinions.

Introduction:
to come up with (phrv) (think of - especially an answer, a plan, a solution)

Introduction #1: software innovation
Introduction #2 : product innovation in the world of new cars (he's going to cover some of the basic developments in the history of car innovation and the he'll cover some of latest (muộn nhất) developments in European car innovation.)
Introduction #3: innovation in the food world with their packaging designs.

Lecture:
He said that in business there are many types of innovation such as product innovation, business organization innovation, and marketing innovation and other types of innovation.

Today, he will talk about product innovation. so that mean how business come up with ideas for new products:
- First, we'll talk about innovation in the 21st century in general.
- Then I'll tell you about some qualities that successful innovations share and give you two good examples.

In the past, businesses got a lot of their new ideas because something they did was a surprise or a mistake. Innovation, they didn't plan. it was just luck.
- Times have changed in the 21st century, it's not enough for companies to depend on luck to develop new products and to compete (v-cạnh tranh) successfully in the global markets.
- In fact, the research show us that the best company make innovation a large part of their business. That means they spend a lot of their money on innovation.
That is exactly the opposite of waiting for luck to happen, right?

Now ... He want to point out one thing that these innovative companies have in common, one thing that they all have, and that is "Courage".

Courage and explain more:
What I'm saying is these companies aren't afraid to take risks. These companies are constantly trying new ideas, even though they know that many of their ideas are going to fail, the business experts say that these companies "make their own luck". (They make their own luck. They are risk-takers, to put it simply.

For example:
Let's take a look at a couple of successful, innovative companies, meaning companies that are creating new products and are doing well.

+ Apple computer:
A few years ago, they come up with the idea to make a totally new product, a digital music player that was small and easy to use - the iPod.
Steve Jobs realized it wasn't enough to create a fun little machine for music. People still need a reason to buy it. So he asked his company to think outside the box. He wanted his people to come up with a way for customers to use this little machine to get music out of their computer and the Internet.

At the time, everybody said this was impossible, impossible, because no body had ever done before. Apple got to work and solved all the technical and legal problems.

Today, the iPod earns over one billion dollars a year for Apple.
=> It's that courage to take a risk and try something completely new. (a first important characteristic of today's innovative companies)

+ Starbucks: The coffee chain - 10,000 stores around the world.
Starbucks was looking for a way to get new customers, and they wanted a way to make customers stay in the store longer. And what else? spend more money. That's when they started thinking outside of the box.

They realized that their stores could be more than a place where people buy a cup of coffee. They thought about what people do in their free time, and they realized that people spend a lot of time on the Internet. So they started to provide wireless Internet service in their coffee shops. Right? They even have some Starbucks where you can download music to your computer.

I've got to point out that Starbucks can't say for sure that their profits went up after this changes. but they did find out that customer who use the Internet at Starbucks stay in the store nine times longer than customers who just drink coffee there. So probably, they spend more money at Starbucks, too.

=>It's an example of how a totally new idea can change a business. In this case, they thought of a product in a new, a strange way. A way no one had ever thought about.

We've run out of time. So, let's pick up tomorrow.