Low employee turnover = high profits

Taco Bell discovered that the 20% of stores with the lowest employee turnover rates had double the sales and 55% higher profits than the 20% of stores with the highest employee turnover rates.

Source: The Service-Profit Chain, Harvard Business Review, Mar-Apr 1994

Disruptive innovation: Steel Mini Mills

In The Innovators' Solution an example of disruptive innovation is steel mini-mills, e.g. Nucor. Put integrated mill companies out of most businesses. But eventually forced all integrated mills out of a given product and hence lowered prices and wiped out their huge profits.

Governments and Behaviour Change (examples)

Great blog post with lots of examples of successful behaviour change initiatives:

http://www.corporateculture.co.uk/blog/government-and-behaviour-change-2-what-examples-are-there-turning-behavioural-insight-practice

Sainsbury's Fresh Kitchen format

Sainsbury's are trialling a new format aimed at lunchtime trade:

Lego Mindstorms: Accidental Innovation

The Lego Mindstorms range came about as a result of Lego embracing hacking of their products.

Mindstorms became Lego's most successful line.

Vodafone Webbox

Vodafone realised that in the developing world many people who don't even have food have a TV. So they put a mobile phone in the body of a keyboard, and added a TV connector. This makes the internet available at a very low cost.

Amazon Door Desks

To show of their thrifty roots Amazon still use doors as desks:

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/01/early-amazon-door-desks.html

Colour blocking in action from Pringles

Nice pic with some colour blocking in Tesco here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dead_insect/320643464/

Pringles have lots of other good pics on Flickr showing colour blocking.

Naming

There are lots of ways to categorise possible names. Adapting the work of others, this is the best I've come up with so far.

Types of name:

1) Descriptive/functional names:

1.1 Functional (what the company does), e.g. Microsoft

1.2 Experiential (benefit you get from it), e.g. Vue Cinemas

1.3 Provenance (people or place related), e.g. Oprah Magazine, Evian, John Lewis

1.4 Customer promise: Taste the Difference, Pret a Manger

2) Associative names

2.1 Emotional/personality, e.g. Yahoo!

2.2 Visual, e.g. Red Bull

3) Abstract, e.g. Orange, Blueotooth, Apple

Within these categories you can have:

- Existing words or coined/invented ones

- Full names or abbreviates

- Literal names or metaphorical ones (e.g. Oracle, O2, Internet Explorer)

Stopgap Character Analysis (for interviews etc)

Stopgap recruitment use a personality test, which seems to be a simplified version of Myers-Briggs. It has some questions that might be interesting in interviews too.

http://profile.stopgap.co.uk/sgca.php