Acumen in Action #10 | Innovation

After Training Resources

Where is innovation born? Sure, sometimes it happens like Newton where an apple falls and you get that stroke of genius, but probably more often than not, innovation isn't a singular individual ah-ha moment.

Instead, most innovations are born in places where ideas can combine, even collide with one another, to form newer ideas, bigger ideas, and better ideas. In short, the place (or the space) where innovation happens probably plays a bigger role than most people think.

Take Alcoa, the aluminum giant. In the early nineties they followed people into their homes to study how they consumed soda pop. They found that consumers would put a few cans of soda in the fridge from their 12 pack, which were sold in a suitcase type package back then, and the rest of the cans they'd put in the pantry. This presented a problem, when all the cold pop in the fridge was gone, consumers would choose a different cold drink instead of taking the time to put more cans (aluminum cans mind you) in the fridge.

Alcoa developed an ingenious solution, but how they developed it was equally ingenious. Check out the slides below to see what we mean…

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Founded in 2002, Acumen Learning's highly customized business acumen and sales training programs have helped organizations develop employees who are more engaged, efficient, and effective in their work. To further support its mission, Acumen Learning published, Seeing the Big Picture – Business Acumen to Build Your Credibility, Career, and Company, in 2012 which quickly became a #1 Wall Street Journal and a New York Times bestseller. More than 15 years later, Acumen Learning has been trusted by more than 200 organizations on six continents to help employees understand how their company makes money, and to take real steps towards improving that process.