Who Are You Calling an Industrialist, Mr. Seth Godin?

The other day, renowned author and blogger Seth Godin posted his blog “Industrialists are not Capitalists.” He made a point that “capitalists”, as he calls them, are the innovators, and industrialists are the optimizers, realizing efficiency and more profit out of industries created by the capitalists.

Is building a better mousetrap an innovation or an optimization?

[SOURCE: © June Campbell, used according to Creative Commons License]

Three Obvious, Frequently Forgotten Axioms of Business Innovation

Cross posted from SAP on the Cloud

Innovation has become one of the most overused words in the corporate-speak lexicon. In fact, many of us have stopped understanding what it really means. Being in the IT industry or trade, you probably receive promotional content from enterprise tech companies with exciting headlines such as “Achieve Business Innovation Now!” It might seem that marketers are grasping for new adjectives to modify the world innovation to make it more impactful, but business innovation has an important meaning that many executives, product engineers, and IT folks don’t pay enough attention to in their work.

Business innovation is adding new unique abilities to a company’s business practices to deliver competitively differentiating value to customers. What follows are three obvious axioms for achieving business innovation that people often fail to remember.