The Orange Power Wellies, which were developed by renewable energy experts Got Wind, convert heat from the feet into an electrical current.

Twelve hours of fancy footwork can generate enough energy to power a mobile phone for one hour.

Great for all festival goers this year.

This Friday at The Value Engineers we are having our annual room swap, when by we resuffle everyone in the office so that we work with new people. 

The benefit of working in an old coaching inn is that each room becomes like a small close knit family and by the end of the year we have, where we are lucky, made life long friendships.  The disadvantage is that it is easy to be distant from consultants who work in other rooms.  A reshuffle means that we keep our old friends but have the opportunity to make new ones.

Its also like a creative breath of fresh air as new people bring new ideas and new ways of working – it helps us to create a culture that is constantly changing and reinventing itself and is one of the reasons I enjoy working at The Value Engineers.

This year we have dipped into our annual charity budget to treat us all to a cream team – a welcome treat on a hot day of lugging boxes around and a great way of generating money for Action Medical Research.

If you’d like to treat your office and feel good about it, you can order a cream tea here.

I recently read an article about a company called Cue Ball who have discovered another effective way to get consumer insight.  They ask customers what they are doing three minutes immediately before and three minutes after they use their product or service.

One of their products provided investment analysts with financial earnings data.  When they applied the three-minute rule — they discovered that immediately after getting their data, their customers were painstakingly importing it into Excel and reformatting it. This observation led them to prioritize developing a more seamless Excel plug-in feature with enhanced formatting capability over other product development initiatives. The result was an almost immediate and very significant uplift in sales.

The three-minute rule also helps highlight unique cross-selling opportunities such as finding out that disposable cameras are often bought straight after the purchase of new born nappies.

The three minute rule is useful to overcome product myopia, produce cross selling opportunities and design better (and more lucrative) selling experiences. Customers seek solutions, but you might only be providing part of one.  The three-minute rule is a forcing mechanism to see the bigger picture and adjacent opportunities.