Trend-Driven Innovation Beat Accelerating Customer Expectations

by Mason, Henry; Mattin, David; Luthy, Maxwell; Dumitrescu, Delia; Osterwalder, Alexander

• ISBN13: 9781119076315
• ISBN10: 1119076315
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2015-10-05
• Publisher: Wiley

Summary

Trend-Driven Innovation

Beat accelerating customer expectations.

Every business leader, entrepreneur, innovator, and marketer wants to know where customers are headed. The problem? The received wisdom on how to find out is wrong.

In this startling new book, the team at TrendWatching share a powerful, counter-intuitive truth: to discover what people want next, stop looking at customers and start looking at businesses. That means learning how to draw powerful insights from the way leading brands and disruptive startups—from Apple to Uber, Chipotle to Patagonia—redefine customer expectations.

Sharing the secrets that have led thousands of the world's most successful brands and agencies to rely on TrendWatching for over a decade, Trend-Driven Innovation is the book that will reconfigure your view of the business world forever.

You'll learn:

• How to spot emerging trends using three crucial building blocks, and how to recognize the expectation gaps that herald opportunity.
• Why most professionals focus on precisely the wrong trends and innovations, and how to avoid this.
• How to turn trends and insights into innovations that customers will love.

Amid the endless change that defines today's business environment, opportunity is everywhere. Highly practical, and featuring real-world examples from around the world, Trend-Driven Innovation is the actionable, battle-tested manual that will enable you harness those opportunities time after time. Setting you up to build an organization that matters, products customers love, and campaigns people can't stop talking about.

Author Biography

Henry Mason (Managing Director) has overseen trend thinking across all trendwatching.com's free publications and paid services since 2010. In the past 3 years, Henry has given over 50 keynote presentations in more than 25 countries across 6 continents. Henry has been quoted as a trend expert in numerous business publications, including The Guardian, Financial Times, El Pais, The New York Times and The Economist, and has appeared on television networks such as CNBC, the BBC, Al Jazeera and Brazil's Globo News.

David Mattin (Head of Trends & Insights) is responsible for day-to-day trend thinking across free and Premium content. He started his career on the features desk at The Times, and has written and presented documentaries for BBC Radio. His business, innovation and consumer insight journalism has appeared in a wide range of newspapers and magazines including CNBC, Quartz, Inc Magazine, the National, Harper’s Bazaar and more. 

Delia Dumitrescu (Lead Innovation Architect) has delivered presentations and workshops across Europe, and guest lectures at various universities. She is a published trend and innovation expert, and author of several books including Road Trip to Innovation and was featured in Forbes Romania’s Top 30 Under 30 in 2014.

Maxwell Luthy (Senior Trend Strategist) represents trendwatching.com in North America, delivering keynotes and facilitating client workshops. Maxwell was previously the Director of trendwatching.com’s 2,600+ international spotter network.. He has spoken on trends in the US, UK, Turkey, South Africa and the Philippines, and has been quoted as a trend expert in publications such as the Financial Times.

Table of Contents

1 WHY NOW

Welcome to the Expectation Economy

The Expectation Economy 06

Why your customers are (almost) impossible to please

2 SCAN

The Overwhelm Is the Opportunity

Trends 101 44

Where to start with consumer trends

Watch Businesses First, Customers Second 60

The counterintuitive secret to customer centricity

Trends in the Wild 86

Four trends and how we identified them

Building a Trend Framework 98

Why you need one; how to build it; sharing ours

3 FOCUS

What to Run With, When, and How

Post-Demographic Consumerism 120

A license to focus on surprising things

Evaluating Trends for Opportunity 144

Drill deeper into the opportunities offered to you by any trend

The Consumer Trend Radar 172

Prioritize and visualize application of the trends you’ll run with

4 GENERATE

Turn Insights into Ideas

The Consumer Trend Canvas 200

A simple tool for generating compelling, trend-driven innovation ideas

The Consumer Trend Canvas in Action 224

Practical examples to learn from

Trend-Driven Ideation Sessions 244

Run workshops that deliver winning ideas

5 EXECUTE

Realize Your Ideas, or Realize They Are Useless

The First Yards 264

Make those first steps count

6 CULTURE

Unlock an Opportunity Machine

Your Trend Department 286

Get your colleagues to see around corners

Trend-Driven Ecosystems 306

Tap into and harness external networks, too