5 Minutes To New Ideas With Phil McKinney

Did you know the opposite of bravery is not cowardice? The opposite of bravery is conformity. Doing everything the same way that everybody else does it, being like everybody else, thinking the same w…

I’ve been in the innovation game for more than 30 years. Hard to believe. With that many years comes loads of experience but also some downsides.

As with most things, when you’ve done something for a…

I’m an innovation guy. 

  It may not say so on my business card, but that’s what I do.    I encourage people, whether inside HP or in my meetings with customers around the world, to accept that the…

On October 4, 1957, Russia launched a beach-ball-sized satellite named Sputnik, which orbited the Earth in just over ninety-six minutes. The previous frontrunner in the space race, the United States,…

I’ve never shopped at the online craft marketplace Etsy.com or even any of its competitors. 

Not an area of interest for me as I’m not often in the market for hand-knitted iPod cozies, customized g…

What is surprisingly inconvenient about my product? 

The designers and engineers who work at HP face many challenges in getting their ideas signed off on.    It’s a long process from an idea t…

Do you sell atoms or bytes?  

Do you think that your answer could change over the next five years? Think about Amazon and the Kindle.    Jeff Bezos asked, What is my role going to be if the nature …

Where do we perform product research and development? Where else could this be done?  

What is your organization’s philosophy about design and development?  

Do you keep everything in-house, or d…

In the traditional R&D process, the product is developed and then handed off to the design team to “wrap” it and make it look pretty. 

  The drawback is that this approach is out of date; in the la…

What emotional, psychological, or status benefits could people derive from using my product?

Do you have diamonds stashed away that you reckon you can sell if times ever get tough?

Say, a family heir…

Do you have a digital twin?

The concept first formed on consumer sites like Yelp, but it’s becoming a catchphrase in marketing and sales. The idea is that dedicated users of sites like Yelp eventual…

Who am I not selling to because I think they can’t or won’t pay for my product?

Price is king, right? “Build ’em cheap and stack ’em high” is practically the motto of most segments of the tech indust…

One thing is to know what your customers want to do, another is to understand how they intend to get it done. It’s easy to look at their goals and tell yourself that your product will match their ne…

What are your criteria for deciding that an idea is worth pursuing? We all have our own set of selection criteria, the first of which is usually looking for profits. However, selecting a course of ac…

My wife is famous for being a little frugal.

She once routed me and our son Logan  from Las Vegas to Phoenix to Los Angeles and finally to San Jose because she could save twenty bucks each over the n…

One of the first products I created as a software developer was a touch-typing program called Typing Instructor . 

This was back in 1985, and at that time there was no such thing as a standard PC.

In…

A few years ago, a passenger complaint letter to Virgin Atlantic circulated around the web.

It was very long, fully illustrated with photos, clearly somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and very funny, but it m…

There is a reason that the percentage in this question is as high as it is.

Sure, it would sound less scary and more reasonable if I asked you how you could cut your price by 5 percent, or maybe 8 …

We tend to assume that any customer is a good customer.

However, if you find that you’re working like crazy and have a solid and reliable customer base, but you’re still not making the profits you …

Once a product has sold, it’s pretty much out of your control.

You may have an idea why people will buy it, and what they’ll do with it, but the most you can ever do is guess.

So why are you assu…