Nancy Schaefer
- Managing Partner for Insight, Innovation and Brand Strategy at Consumer Dynamics
- Clients include: Bausch & Lomb, Bayer Healthcare, Colgate-Palmolive, Johnson & Johnson, P&G/Gillette, Pfizer, Kellogg's, Kraft Foods, Pepsico, Quaker Oats, Starbucks, Clif Bar, USPS, Pernod Ricard
- VP of Marketing at General Foods (now Kraft Foods)
- Account management at Young & Rubicam
- Creative marketing consulting at Kane, Bortree and Faith Popcorn’s Brain Reserve
- Guest lecturer at Columbia University and teaches innovation at NYU's Stern School of Business
- All 6 Best Practices
- Pre-Meeting Discovery Process
- One-on-One Call with Expert
- Meeting Summary Report
- Post-Meeting Engagement
Disruptive Innovation and Blue Ocean Strategy
Common Problems
- Company wants disruptive innovation without investing to properly develop and execute.
In a challenging economy, companies are focused on costs, but they want the big-bang results of disruptive innovations without spending the money required. They have not prioritized innovation, they don't have a strategic approach to it, and they have a low tolerance for risk.
- Company is losing share and needs something big to stay in the game but doesn’t know how.
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These companies are seeing their competitors taking off, often with big innovations, but don’t know how to respond. They may try approaches that just produce a lot of small ideas that are not going to help them break out.
- Brand is losing its differentiation in the marketplace, or within the company’s portfolio.
I work with companies that may have, for example, two kids’ brands. Consumers don’t know the difference between them. The company needs the brands to stand out from each other and in the marketplace. Otherwise, they risk cannibalizing each other.
- Company has aggressive growth goals and needs disruptive innovation to achieve the targets.
This happens often after an acquisition. The company has been growing five or 10 percent, and the new owner says, "I want to grow this business 30, 40, 50 percent." You can’t get that kind of growth by just doing what you’ve done before, only a little better.
- Company culture is focused on process and managing risk, which thwarts innovation.
Health care companies, for example, are always worried about legal and regulatory issues. Other companies use systems such as stage-gating, which sets up various numbers “gates” – concept scores, cost of goods, etc. – that innovations must meet.
If they can’t get through a particular gate, the project can get killed. That makes it very hard to do big innovations.