Innovatrs are disruptive. They think outside the system and create new paradigms. They’re also maddeningly difficult to shop for. What do you buy the innovatr in your life? Don’t worry – every day this week we’ll feature a different gadget to give you a gift idea. Have you ever wondered what your innovatr’s voice looks [...]

Webdoc is the latest creative start-up to get our juices flowing. It’s a tool for creating rich media content, started by a group of innovative Swiss. Here’s how it works. You sign up for the service, which is completely free as of now. You create a new post which pops up as a blank canvas. [...]

We usually think of geeks, techies, product developers et al as being glued 24/7 to their computer screens, but they actually, every once in a while, socialise OFFline and gather to drink beers and eat pizzas. Meetup.com, a NYC start-up, has become an offline social networking success story. Founded during the dotcom boom era, it [...]

A few weeks ago, we talked about location-based social networking from a marketing perspective. Today, we’re having a look at innovative start-ups which use geographically based technology. First up is Batchgeo, an incredibly user-friendly mapping service working in tandem with Google Maps. It converts spreadsheets full of addresses into personalized maps, saving you the labour [...]

With the success and popularity of Zynga’s FarmVille and other such applications, marketers the world over have acknowledged the subtle potential of fusing entertainment with marketing, gamification, as a means of stimulating engagement and encouraging consumer participation with the brand. An exploration of the merits of using gamification tactics as a means of marketing innovatively.

As competition gets tougher and tougher more companies are using social media and crowdsourcing, asking their customers to provide ideas and help in the decision-making when tackling issues and achieving goals. Social media and crowdsourcing are powerful tools for a company to communicate with consumers when it comes to corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns. Businesses [...]

After almost two years of litigation, yesterday, Nokia Oyj settled their dispute with Apple Inc. A settlement was reached awarding the Finnish phone people a one time payment from Apple and royalties on all iPhones sold since release.  Although the settlement figures are undisclosed, Apple’s first payment is expected to be in the hundreds of [...]

It would be remiss of us not to mention the Linkedin IPO here at innovatrs. After all, it’s not just a staggering value, it’s not just opening up the ‘new bubble’ debate, but it is, let’s be truthful, the moment of which most entrepreneurs dream when they start tinkering with that piece of code in [...]

There is no shortage of advice to early stage businesses: we have our own innovate framework to help you build your business. But there’s one place where most entrepreneurs stumble: how to get the first sale. We are taught how to size the market, how to value your market potential, how to protect your IP, and more [...]

Google’s keynote speech at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising conference in London earlier this month perpetuated a trend that permeated the two-day event. ‘Mobile’, it seems, is what everyone’s talking about. Nicholas Cumisky – Industry Manager at Google Mobile – reckons we’ve now entered the decade of mobile. To illustrate this, Cumisky noted a [...]

Well, it’s been a busy week here on Innovatrs. Monday kicked this week’s music focus off with a look at some general trends, whilst Tuesday sought to simply matters by suggesting that maybe, just maybe, producing groundreaking good music was the answer to combating music piracy. Wednesday looked at the role of digital partnerships, with [...]

So, here we are with part three in this week’s Innovatrs music-industry focus. With Monday focussing on some of the key milestones and developments in the music industry over the past decade, yesterday we looked at the future of music – where it’s heading and the role that good music, social media and branding will [...]

It’s been a busy (and insightful, if we don’t say so ourselves…) week here on Innovatrs. The gaming industry has been examined bottom-up and, starting on Monday, we looked at how social and mobile gaming are heralding true innovation. This was followed on Tuesday by looking at how consoles aren’t quite dead yet, as Microsoft [...]

It’s easy to think that all successful entrepreneurs have a certain je ne sais quoi that makes them impervious to the pitfalls of bad-decision making. But failure is often a necessary route to eventual success. The very fact that someone has failed means they have tried, and it’s this act of trial and error that [...]

Armed with a time-machine, what epoch would you travel back to? Would you travel back to witness the birth of Christ? Or maybe you’d go and have a quick peek at Michelangelo working on his Sistine Chapel masterpiece? If you’re looking to use the benefit of hindsight to build a multi-billion dollar digital powerhouse, maybe [...]

How does a three-man start-up become a £132m powerhouse within a decade? Innovation, that’s how. Innocent Drinks was launched in 1999 by three friends actively seeking to start their own company. A number of ideas were bandied about, and eventually Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jon Wright opted to start a smoothie company. Was it [...]

The companies participating in Sustainable Brands 2010 are functioning models of the evolving relationship between sustainability and innovation. A 2008 report titled “A New Mindset for Corporate Sustainability” was co-sponsored by BT and Cisco, and was written by six academic experts from the United States, China, United Kingdom, Singapore and Spain. According to the report, [...]

Innovate (TM) is an innovation methodology and start-up system exclusive to Innovatrs – we’ve made it freely available to all entrepreneurs as an open source content offering. Innovate is structured into 7 stages and 49 phases covering the critical 3-5 years that it typically takes to bring an idea all the way from concept to exit. Entrepreneurs [...]

Innovate’s (TM) start-up system starts with the @ha idea. Innov@te utilizes a process called CREATE-IVITY (TM) to generate ideas. Once an entrepreneur has developed their @ha idea they need to know what to do with it. Rushing straight from idea to venture is way too hit and miss. Equally, the world over, far too many people [...]

Entrepreneurs chat at the latest blur’d event about why they became Entrepreneurs and what their biggest issue is right now. Check out – http://innovatrs.com

Innovatrs is excited to offer full, open access to the Innovate Wiki for anyone to use, learn from and add to. When we developed Innovate, with its 7 stages and 49 phases for taking an idea all the way through to a successful business, we always dreamed of it becoming an open source methodology that [...]

I have spent the last four and a half years studying, researching and developing the link between creativity and innovation. After all, I spent my early years surrounded by artists and art on the one hand (my mother is a well know art historian and curator) and the Letts media business on the other. In [...]

IDEO video on what organizations will look like in 18 months. Not bad.

It’s day 1 at Innovatrs.com so it seems fitting that I should bang on about why I developed Innovate and as a result Innovatrs.com. 40 odd years ago I was born into the Letts publishing empire. The business was rocking. It had invented the diary way back in the late 1700′s and controlled the industry [...]