What goes into creating an idea that can impact 100’s of million of people?

If I polled most people they would say it’s the “idea”. The core of the “idea” is table stakes but it does not guarantee success. Others would say PR and marketing. While PR and marketing are important – it does not guarantee success.

So what are we missing?

I have a saying I use:

” ..the different between a good innovation and great innovation is the timing”

In most cases you can’t control – much less predict — timing. So what do I mean by “timing”?

* Market conditions

* Customer readiness

* Channel readiness

* Social expectations (changes)

* Competitive changes

* Government / regulatory

So what can you do to make sure the timing is right ?

Guest: Bill Geiser on wearables and smart watches

Bill Geiser is a smartwatch pioneer with 20+ years focus on wearables & smartwatch innovation. He is a serial entrepreneur / intrapreneur with a talent for identifying lucrative, market opportunities and the ability to harvest them evidenced by the fact that he founded two technology start ups acquired by publicly-traded firms.

His most recent company he founded was Meta Watch –  a smartwatch technology and services company with offices in Espoo, Finland & Dallas, Texas. Formed in August 2011 via spin off from the Fossil Group, Inc., the Meta Watch management team brought together over a decade of experience helping companies like Fossil, Microsoft, Palm, Sony Ericsson, adidas and others enter the smartwatch category.

You follow Bill on LinkedIn

Brain Hack/Killer Question

What industries are analogous to ours, and what can we learn from them?

No matter what business we are in, we are all fighting essentially the same fight – no matter the industy. We are all designing a product that a customer will prefer over that of our competitor.

To do this, don’t just look to other widget makers to get a sense of how you are faring in the global business space. Look at other businesses & industries that have similar key elements in common with you.

I find the airline industry endlessly fascinating. It, like the tech industry, has gradually found ways to make its core products less expensive and more accessible to the general public. In return, their customers have had to accept a vast reduction in services and expectations. It’s an interesting seesaw between what the customer truly wants and what they are willing to give up in order to get it. In the center are the core essentials: a safe, convenient flight at a low fare. Everything else falls away in relevance as long as the core criteria are met.

What are the fundamentals that have to be in place in order to maintain an ongoing and happy relationship between you and your customer?

Suppose you were the head of operations at a megachurch like Chicago’s Willow Creek or Joel Osteen’s church in Houston. Joel Osteen’s church seats almost 16,000 people, and runs four worship services plus various meeting groups every Sunday, which means that there are up to 64,000 people. High odds of getting into fender-benders, gridlock, and potentially dangerous traffic in the church’s parking lot increases as one congregation departs and the next one arrives.

So what do you do?  Where do you go to learn the mechanics of moving that number of vehicles, and that number of human beings, in an efficient and safe manner?

You go to the Disney Academy at Disney World.  Sixty years of crowd management has made Disney operations the undisputed champion of event control and coordination. By working with Disney, these churches could learn a few things about integrating their system of traffic flow and parking.  Fender-benders would go down, customer satisfaction would go up,