What Olive Garden Can Teach Us About Innovation; ProductCamp Update

Innovation with a side of unlimited breadsticks

I’m always interested in learning stories of innovation. I find it fascinating to see how people and companies have looked at a problem in a new or different way, and then pulling out some lessons or principles that can be applied in other areas. A great example of this is in a recent promotion from Olive Garden — the casual Italian dining chain — and it’s the subject of this post of mine on the SiriusDecisions blog. There are some great principles that I think are relevant for all types of companies and some lessons that can be applied to a lot of product management challenges. Read the blog post: What Olive Garden Can Teach B-to-B Companies About Innovation

ProductCamp update

We are well into the spring ProductCamp season, and I’ve had the pleasure of attending a few recently — ProductCamp Austin in February and ProductCamp Vancouver last weekend. It was great to meet people in real life who are readers of this blog or whom I’ve interacted with on Twitter (@jefflash). If you’ve never been to a ProductCamp, you really owe it to yourself to try and attend — and if there’s not one where you live, you can always organize your own!.

Consult the master schedule on productcamp.org to see when there will be a ProductCamp in your city or a city you’d like to visit. I’m helping organize ProductCamp St. Louis on March 29, so hope to see some of you there! And if you can’t attend in person, you can follow along on Twitter — usually there’s a dedicated hashtag for each ProductCamp, so you can attend “virtually” regardless of where you are.

What’s Hot on Twitter

Here are a few of my tweets which have generated the most interest over the past week; to get these in real-time, follow me at @jefflash: