Bose: Passion Driven Innovation

A few years ago when I was living in France, my elder brother visited me. We both walked down to the small city centre in hope of finding a home theatre system for me. Back then, I was a novice to the audio world with very limited knowledge on available systems, whilst my brother had years of experience of assembling speakers, woofers, sub-woofers and amplifiers on his own to achieve the best sound effect and quality.

We entered a store that sold several systems. My eyes were immediately caught by popular brand names such as Sony and Yamaha, particularly with the display of large multi-component systems. The intricacies intrigued me and were compelling evidence for what I perceived to be high quality.

While I kept myself busy with the popular and catchy systems, I realized my brother was stationed in a corner looking at what appeared to be a black box akin a computer CPU.

Happy Blue Fish leverages ePublishing to jump into big ocean

I recently met Dominique Busso, founder and CEO of Happy Blue Fish Studio, a small video game start-up in Saint-Malo, France, that focuses on “LifeStyle Gaming” and “Edutainment”. It recently launched Feng Shui, a  casual memory training game for the Apple iPhone, iPodTouch and iPad, where the gamer’s goal is to increase your Positive Energy and Zen Time while keeping Master Ki balanced!

Talking to Dominique brought up quite a few interesting illustrations of critical success factors that in one shape or form we have discussed in this blog: time-to-market, quality, simplicity,  and customer experience, all bound together and enabled by Happy Blue Fish’s ePublishing choice. Let me explain.

Apple finds magic number to square the innovation circle

In The Innovation Manual, David Midgley identifies three categories of challenge from which innovation can spring:  customer, technology, business model.

While examples of innovations in the technology category abound, they sometimes mask where the real innovation takes place. For example, the Wii is less about technology than about bringing to the video-game console a whole new range of customers (yoga beginners, grannies and families) that would not be your typical shoot-`em-up PS3 user. Likewise, despite being encapsulated in hi-tech products, Dell’s or Intel’s innovations were really about creating new ways of doing business.