Join us on December 15 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific for our final webinar of the year (and the last in our New Rules series), Turning Insights into Innovation, featuring Gavin Johnston, Chief Anthropologist of Two West Inc., will provide product teams and developers with a step-by-step guide for turning interesting insights into actionable plans to develop products based on features that customers actually need and will pay for. This webinar will give product managers, marketers and researchers a practical road map to successfully incorporate this innovative approach to help grow their brand.

At the end of last month we finally unveiled the results of the annual innovation priorities and challenges survey dubbed “The Return to Profitability – 2011 Product Innovation Priorities Report” which was conducted in partnership with the Association of International Product Marketing & Management. You can download the complete report for free on our resource page, but we also wanted to share a snapshot of the results and analysis here.

At the highest level, our survey confirms previous estimates that about 50% of all products fail. In our case we found that 50% of respondents had a less than 50% success rate, but we dive deeper into why so many products fail and what product executives are planning to do about it next year. We found four major factors in failing products.

If you attended our webinar on Wednesday, October 27, 2010, you heard Greg Cohen, Senior Principle, 280 Group talk about driving profitable growth through innovation.

In addition to speaking to your customers, he recommended six other research techniques that can lead to insights that will let you develop products that create significantly more value for the customer and ultimately help you create a lasting competitive advantage in the marketplace.

I highly recommend viewing this webinar especially in the light of today's post-recession economy where customers want to see verifiable value from the products and services they buy. In other words, they expect solutions that demonstrably lower costs, improve efficiencies or increase revenues. This means you need to deliver products and services they are willing to pay for.

Greg shares his insights on how to do it in an actionable, easy to understand style.

It was a very well-attended session with a lot of questions from the audience. Unfortunately, as we ran out of time, here are his responses to the questions we couldn't cover. Hope you find the insights valuable.

Looking forward to seeing you again in one of our future webinars.

As we continue our poll series to understand the priorities and challenges that product executives face, I wanted to share the results from our latest poll keeping with the Halloween theme: what is the scariest product innovation mishap you’ve experienced?

There were again over 200 responses representing a solid cross-section of product management, sales, marketing and development roles across all types of industries and geographies.

40% of the respondents believe their scariest innovation mishaps occurred when they let engineers determine the market needs.

Naturally when someone finds themselves drifting from their job description into someone else’s, the reaction can be that “this isn’t what I signed up for”. Even as Brainmates graces the internet with a masterful piece about product managers getting pulled into project management, Forrester writes a post about project managers moving up the value chain into product management.

The two roles are like peanut butter and jelly – they may get smooshed together into a sloppy mess, but many hungry executives don’t understand the finesse in the intricate balance between the two, how to optimize each or how the flavors play on each other. They’re just making a sandwich.

One of the key arguments here is to clearly define the difference between project and product management. I’ll throw mine out there – product managers are focused on what to build when, and project managers are focused on how to build it and who is going to develop or provide which parts when.

I can also share the specific priorities and tasks our company recommends as product versus project management.

A quick recap of some October activities from webinars to featured articles.

An Accept customer, David Wagner from Solution Labs, was recently kind enough to share his experiences in innovation in a webinar and press release as well as a guest blog here today on The Innovation Jam. Solution Labs delivers analysis and reporting solutions that enable organizations to make intelligent forward-looking decisions on capacity planning and performance of IT. They’ve been able to triple revenues, boost productivity 25 percent and beat out much larger competitors.

In a recent post Hari referred to innovation as a sort of ubiquitous religion in the high-tech field. Like religion, there’s hundreds if not thousands of different variations and each individual company or person finds their own way.

So let me start out by saying I’m not here to push our methodology for innovation on others.

Our company is exclusively focused on capacity management, but we compete against much larger companies – some are even more than 100 times our size. So for smaller companies like us, it’s a story of David & Goliath, except we’re competing against a dozen giants that are up to 100 stories tall. We have only two advantages: we are highly focused in a way our competitors are not. And the other is that we are far more nimble and adaptive to our customers, and the markets, evolving requirements.

It's that time of the week again - webinar time! The New Innovation Economy webinar this week features Hector del Castillo from AIPMM and our own Hari Candadai, discussing risk reduction and turning innovation to profit.

As companies begin to look beyond the latest global economic crisis, many are refocusing on growth and innovation has once again become a priority. The approach companies use to generate ideas and turn them into products and services has changed little since before the global economic crisis. In the past few years the core barriers to successful innovation haven’t changed, yet companies have made little progress in surmounting them. Many of the challenges such as finding the right talent, encouraging collaboration and risk taking, and organizing the innovation process from beginning to end are consistent across companies and industries. Many executives understand that innovation is very important, but their companies’ approach to it is often informal, and leaders lack confidence in their decisions.