Happy New Year from Critical Difference!
Keep checking the website here for radical changes and new opportunities for businesses to overcome performance barriers.

Innovations: Some did, some didn't -from 2009
Flop of the Year: Nine with Daniel Day Lewis and many other worthies -warbling a load of showstoppers to help the director (= God) recover his muse. Songs in the key of ego! However the best film that evening was a 2 minute Virgin-funded film publicising new talent, called 'eyebrows'. This set out to show that the emotional power of any scene was less in the eyes than in the eyebrows! There was more wit in this than in the entire conceptual clumsiness of Nine.

Joke of the year: The Stella Artois Hedge Fund! Through the holiday period many supermarkets and off licences soled packs of Stella Artois (10 x 25oml bottles) with eye-catching packaging. 'Hedge Fund' was loudly blazoned on the side, saying 'If you buy this pack we'll grow a hedge in the British countryside.' For every pack you buy Stella will invest in a real Hedge Fund and grow a hedge 6 times the size of this pack! There is also a great picture of two 1950s advertising exec look-alikes giving a hedge a manicure! What next -gloves to warm up socially deprived bankers?

Best live theatre: coming back slightly late to the second half of 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof', at the Novello, when the whole seated row (tiny seats) had to stand up to let me in, a Nigerian man said to me 'You're getting a standing ovation' and as I went past him '...though I can't think why..'

Innovation for 2010: next time the banks get in trouble, let them fail!

Check out the blog and website for more on Business Models (the continuing new Nirvana) and how to develop a Business Planning Bypass to get to (your) market quicker.

All best for 2010 and keep innovating!