As I had mentioned in one of my previous posts on Incremental Innovations, you come across some simple product innovations that make you say Wow, why didn’t someone think about that before?
This weekend, I attended the TieCon East Conference at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. There I met with Alan Chachich, President of BreakThrough NPD. I have known Alan for the last couple of years. When we were catching up on stuff, he handed me his new business card and that is when I discovered this great little product innovation that to me makes a lot of sense and solves a problem I have always had. The back of his business card looks like that shown below (click on the image for a larger view)
Brilliant !! I meet so many people during customer visits, user conferences and other industry conferences. I collect business cards from many people and in many cases I have follow up actions that I need to take. Or in other cases, I want to jot down topics that I have discussed. This is exactly what Alan has done on the back of his business card and in a very professional way. No more messy notes that I leave on the card or elsewhere. I will admit that I don’t know if this is Alan’s original idea or not, but this is the first time I am seeing this and hence I have to give some credit to Alan for it.
Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy 
Yes this came from my cards as Alan ack’d in his own blog post.. check http://www.mwigan.com for pdf downloads of the final well tuned version(s). Thanks Alan, I pass out the principles and the results of many many trials as often as I can- and Im please that you acknowledged it! For those who are interested Im happy to share with them the series of incremental trials I undertook to tune this card design up. I go the handout/callback-response rate up from 1.2% to over 50% eventually… Marc Wigan
not bad
Hi Gopal,
Thank you. We are always standing on the shoulders of others one way or another. The idea was not original to me. I passed the acknowledgement back another step in a note on my blog.
^^AC
Definitely this is “wow” incremental innovation. I always write behind a card about when and where did we meet and topics we discussed, but never do that in front of the person (makes me look bad for spoling someone’s card they care about). So Alan does have good eye for a networker’s unmet needs. Now I know what my next card will look like on backside.
Thanks for sharing!