Two years ago, in the second post I ever wrote on Innovation Minute, I wrote about the Flip Video camera:
Add video recorders to the list of industries being disrupted by “good enough” products that, with less features than the established players, become both easier to use and less expensive.  Have you seen the Flip Mino?… Seriously, you couldn’t make something easier to use.  It is fantastic.
But, I ended with this paragraph:
The problem is that the Flip is also a great example of a product that quickly disrupts an industry, only to itself …

Changing user behavior is really, really hard. It has to be one of the biggest obstacles to reaching innovation success. I’ve seen it with my start-ups that have introduced new products, and I’ve seen it with companies that make seemingly insignificant changes to what a user has already learned about a product. It is impossible to underestimate the effort and risk at asking a user to do something new.
I was reminded of this golden rule when I came across a Quora article titled “Why hasn’t another product …

I think the best businesses are ones where the business model is so ingrained into the product or service that you can’t think about the business and business model separately.  That is not always the case – most businesses are built first and they try to answer their business model question later.
My broad definition of a business model is “How do you separate customers from their money”?  Business models aren’t only about your pricing model; it’s about the entire process, from how a customer finds out about you, to how …

The biggest news in the world of start-ups in the last 24 hours is the announcement that investor Yuri Milner of DST is partnering with famed angel investor Ron Conway on a new innovative start-up investment vehicle called Start Fund.  The Start Fund is offering $150,000 loans to every one of the 43 start-ups in the Y Combinator class.
Some background here.  Yuri Milner runs the Russian investment firm DST, which has already been a force of disruption in the venture capital world by making very large investments in Facebook, Zynga, …

Innovation is about the future.  And the start of every year brings one set of future predictions after another.
The best list I’ve seen I discovered reading Fred Wilson’s A VC blog.  He posted a presentation (that I’ve embedded below) from the marketing firm JWT titled “100 Things to Watch in 2011”.  Apparently they’ve been doing this for years, and appear to be fairly good at their predictions.   I highly recommend going through the presentation (though odds are you already have – as of this writing its been viewed 349,000 times, …

With this last post of 2010, I wanted to write about some of my observations of retailers and products during this holiday shopping month.
Charity giving at the register. When I was making a $50 purchase at the local Pottery Barn, as I was paying the clerk asked if I’d like to donate $1 to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.  I think this is a terrific way to raise money (and I said yes).  First, I’ve already taken out my credit card, so that barrier is gone.  Second, they didn’t ask me …

Some people stick their noses up in the air at the idea that a company “suggestion box” can be a source of practical innovation.   Amazon would beg to differ.
For those not familiar with the Amazon Prime program, members pay a $79 annual fee to receive free 2-day shipping on most products stocked by Amazon.  According to a BusinessWeek article, Amazon Prime might be responsible for 20% of Amazon’s US sales, which were about $16 billion in the last 12 months.  That means Prime could be a $3 billion dollar program.
Guess …

In the early days of the Apple App Store, there were free apps and there were paid apps.  With the release last year of the iPhone 3.0 software, Apple began to support “in-app purchases”, and there were great expectations (and a little trepidation) that it would help developers make more money off of their apps by offering them for free, and then charging for various things like new levels, hints, or virtual goods within the apps.
Apparently this simple pricing innovation is indeed reaping big rewards.

Each month Blogging Innovation publishes a set of “Innovation Perspectives” articles focused on a particular subject.  October’s topic was “Thinking about the future: what big innovation do you expect within 10 years?”, and I contributed an article titled “What happens when we are all reduced to an algorithm?” (click link to read the full article).
The premise of my article is that our roles as both consumers and producers will change dramatically over the coming years as more and more information is available about us online.
Now, the most obvious application of …

This innovation goes in the “why didn’t I think of that” category.
Solve Media is turning CAPTCHAs into an advertising opportunity.  Instead of displaying random words with lines crossed through them (that personally I often find too hard for even a human to decipher), Solve Media’s CAPTCHA’s are advertisements with phrases or words embedded in them that you need to retype.  They claim that this type of ad will increase the user’s recall of the brand.  That seems very plausible to me.
Not everybody loves this idea though.  On Gizmodo, author Kyle …