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June 2, 2006

Innovation through design thinking

In an hour-long MIT World video, Tim Brown of IDEO explains the relationship between design thinking and innovation. According to Brown, design is everywhere around us - on the covers of business magazines, as part of consumer experiences at companies like Nike and Apple, and increasingly mentioned by Fortune 500 executives as an important way to grow a business. For many companies, design thinking is a way to create the future. To support this view, Tim Brown produces a wide array of examples from Corporate America. Motorola uses design thinking to create new products and service offerings. P&G uses design thinking to come up with new products to solve problems, like how to clean carpets. Microsoft uses design thinking to explore where technology will go in the future, especially as it relates to the Windows computing platform. JP Morgan uses design thinking to come up with financial solutions for clients with 401(K) accounts. Kraft uses design thinking to improve the supply chain and boost overall business value.

Anyway, there's not a full transcript of the presentation available, but here's a brief blurb about IDEO's "design thinking" philosophy from the MIT World website:

"Not so long ago, designers belonged to a “priesthood.” Given an assignment, a designer would disappear into a back room, “bring the result out under a black sheet and present it to the client.” Brown and his colleagues at IDEO, the company that brought us the first Apple Macintosh mouse, couldn’t have traveled farther from this notion.

At IDEO, a “design thinker” must not only be intensely collaborative, but “empathic, as well as have a craft to making things real in the world.” Since design flavors virtually all of our experiences, from products to services to spaces, a design thinker must explore a “landscape of innovation” that has to do with people, their needs, technology and business. Brown dips into three central “buckets” in the process of creating a new design: inspiration, ideation and implementation.

Design thinkers must set out like anthropologists or psychologists, investigating how people experience the world emotionally and cognitively. While designing a new hospital, IDEO staff stretched out on a gurney to see what the emergency room experience felt like. “You see 20 minutes of ceiling tiles,” says Brown, and realize the “most important thing is telling people what’s going on.” In a completely different venue, IDEO visited a NASCAR pit crew to come up with a more effective design for operating theaters.

After inspiration comes “building to think:” often a hundred prototypes created quickly, both to test the design and to create stakeholders in the process. Says Brown, “So many good ideas fail to make it out to market because they couldn’t navigate through the system.” IDEO counts on storytelling to develop and express its ideas, and to buy key players into the concept. Finally, IDEO relies on constantly refreshing its sources of inspiration by bringing in bold thinkers to campus, and increasingly, focusing on socially oriented design problems.

Tags: IDEO innovation design

[image: Tim Brown of IDEO]

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Transition to the Creative Economy: Podcast of the Week

Phil McKinney of the Killer Innovations podcast (ranked #2 on Apple iTunes within the business category) recently uploaded an MP3 file of a presentation that he did in Washington, D.C. for a group of 150-200 business executives. The podcast is a great overview of why the U.S. needs to transition from a knowledge economy to a creative economy. As McKinney explains, this transition will necessitate a move away from a focus on business process re-engineering and six-sigma to creativity and innovation. Thanks to the flattening of the world brought on by trends such as overseas outsourcing, business is no longer about where you live or where you operate. Rather, it is all about how you embrace the competitive changes happening within the global marketplace.

In the approximately 20-minute podcast, McKinney covers a number of important topics:

(1) The movement offshore of R&D operations and innovation networks;

(2) The importance of innovation & creativity within the educational curriculum;

(3) Why foreign companies are re-locating their design centers to the US;

(4) Why the MFA degree may become just as important as the MBA degree;

(5) Why innovation is all about understanding customer needs;

(6) Why innovation is not a fad;

(7) The key problems that prevent many companies from transitioning to the creative economy;

(8) How to measure the success of an innovation program with key metrics;

According to McKinney, creativity is a skill that can be taught, practiced and mastered just like any other skill. Moreover, creativity needs to become a core component of the educational curriculum from an early age. For workers already caught in the transition from a knowledge economy to a creative economy, McKinney suggests community colleges might represent a low-cost, relatively easy way to retro-fit workers with global innovation skills.

Tags: innovation creativity creativeeconomy

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The "ideas men" of India

Stuart Crainer of the London Times recently suggested that the "ideas men" of India are the new superstars of the fast-growing Indian economy. These superstars include C. K. Prahalad, co-author of Competing for the Future; Ram Charan, business guru; Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize winner for economics; and Vijay Govindarajan, professor of international business at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. Across India, students are embracing the study of management and business in the same way they once embraced science and engineering. In March, for example, Harvard Business School opened up its first-ever India Research Center to tap into student demand. Meanwhile, some European B-schools report that 20-25% of each incoming class is now comprised of students from India.

In a follow-up blog post, Vijay Govindarajan offers insights into how and why this enormous flowering of intellectual talent is happening now within India. After all, twenty years ago, he was the first Indian faculty member at Tuck. Now, as Govindarajan points out, "it's not unusual to see 20% of faculty with Indian roots and connection.” After explaining the various factors that made him so passionate about learning and ideas while growing up in India, Vijay Govindarajan suggests that a "learning ethic" has replaced the traditional "work ethic" for many Indians:

"I think there is a cultural aspect to learning as well. In India, learning is viewed as sacred tradition, and I believe there is a strong "learning ethic" woven through our culture and lives. I am beginning to see this "learning ethic" much in the same way as I view the "work ethic" of the early Protestants. In part it explains the devotion of my grandfather to his students, and it explains why his actions shape my thinking to this very day."

With that in mind, VG also lists four questions that every manager or executive should consider as they prepare for the transition to the global creative economy:

(1) Am I passionate about what I am doing?

(2) Am I learning -- becoming different and growing intellectually?

(3) Am I altering the aspirations of others, helping them to set their sights higher than they previously envisioned?

(4) Do I respect the corporations and executives I work with?

Tags: India innovation VijayGovindarajan

[Image: Vijay Govindarajan]

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Would you want Attila the Hun managing your innovation program?

In The Journal of Private Equity, Albert Madansky, a professor emeritus of business at the University of Chicago, recently examined the relevance of war as a paradigm for business. Consider for a moment that Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Sitting Bull and General George Patton have all been held up as role models for business leadership and strategy. For decades, managers have labored under the notion that conducting business is like conducting a war: "Business resembles nothing so much as war itself. Takeover attacks, market invasions, price wars, merger maneuvers, and territory gains: the language of war is now an integral part of every executive's vocabulary." Yet, as Madansky asks at the beginning of the article: "Is there logic to the analogy of business with war?" After all, isn't today's business all about open innovation, collaborative sharing and co-opetition rather than competition?

In other words, would you really want Attila the Hun running your innovation program? If you were writing a book about innovation, which historical figure would you choose as the prototype of the perfect innovative manager? Madansky, for example, points to Professor Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes detective novels as the perfect example of a "ratiocinative, yet ruthless, decision maker."

What do you think? Feel free to send me a quick e-mail or leave a comment with ideas.

Tags: innovation albertmadansky

[images: Attila the Hun and Sun Tzu]

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ESPN, the great sports innovator

Last month, Jason Corsello of The Human Capitalist weblog examined three different types of innovation: business model innovation, collaborative innovation and cultural innovation. In a follow-up post that draws on his observations from a recent IBM innovation event, Jason highlights the tremendous amount of innovation occurring at sports network ESPN. There are four major areas where ESPN has truly become an innovator, primarily by responding to the needs and desires of its customers: Mobile ESPN ("This product is unique and every sports fan's dream"); SportsCenter Home Video; the website ESPN.com and ESPN Fantasy Sports. The ESPN website is especially noteworthy for the pace and scale of innovation:

"Is this site not constantly innovating? Last month they added ESPN Motion, a video sidebar of SportsCenter excerpts. Yes it was annoying at first, but others have followed and I have been forced to adjust my computer settings to adapt. They are always rolling out new products via sponsors and partners (travel with Orbitz, polls with Papa Johns, and contests with KFC)."

The bottom line? "ESPN's pace of innovation is unmatched in the online world including in that the likes of Google, Yahoo! and eBay!"

Tags: innovation ESPN

[Image: ESPN at the NFL Draft via Flickr]

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June 1, 2006

June 1 innovation linkage

Clayton Christensen: Are you an innovator? [Reading the World]
Washington's Innovation & Technology metrics [URENIO portal]
Borderless innovation in Baja California [Google Video]
Leonardo Da Vinci: Man, Inventor, Genius [New York Times]
Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism [Jaron Lanier]
Johns Hopkins: Top inventions of the year [SharkRide]
CNET's AllYouCanUpload is disruptive [Tech Crunch]
Now you can lease a Segway [Tech Dirt]
Soccer-playing robots [Popular Science]
50 Million Americans create Web content [ClickZ News]

[image: New York Times]

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Whatever you're thinking, it's probably wrong

Management guru Tom Peters regularly highlights new books from cutting-edge thinkers who help to clarify his views on business. The latest book is called Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite, written by Paul Arden, a former Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi. According to Tom, the book is a "no-bull must read" that's "very short and very sweet - and graphically compelling." As an example of Paul Arden's pithy writing style, Tom points to the following piece of advice: "TRAPPED. It's not because you are making the wrong decisions. It's because you are making the right ones. We try to make sensible decisions based on the facts in front of us. The problem with making sensible decisions is that so is everybody else."

Anyway, what would be a business book without a set of matching PowerPoint slides? On his weblog, Tom Peters has provided a batch of slides inspired by the Paul Arden book. Just be careful before you start applying any of this Saatchi & Saatchi know-how. On Slide #12, Paul Arden explains how an art museum chose to market itself with the following slogan: "An ace cafe with quite a nice museum attached." The slogan is meant to capture the idea that many people tend to focus more on the dining options at a museum (i.e. the museum cafe), and less on the actual artwork.

Is it just me, or does there appear to be a whole genre of business books around the theme of "Everything you know about X is wrong." As an example, I'm thinking of last summer's bestselling book from Steven Johnson called Everything Bad is Good for You. Out of curiosity, I did a quick search for "Everything You Know is Wrong" on Amazon.com and received more than 1,250 results. Publishers must love this idea. With that in mind, here's a guaranteed bestseller idea: "Everything You Know About Business Innovation is Wrong."

Tags: creativity TomPeters

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Five secrets to successful innovation

In an article for Marketing Week, Alan Mitchell (a UK-based marketing guru and the author of Right Side Up and The New Bottom Line) explains that there are five secrets to successful innovation:

(1) If you can possibly avoid it, don't launch a product that is not immediately and intuitively grasped by your customers;

(2) Launch your new product under the umbrella of an existing brand, because launching new brands is getting impossibly expensive;

(3) Avoid having to rely on new distribution channels;

(4) Don't be mesmerised by new technologies that seem to promise the earth but that you don't really understand;

(5) Remember your context.

However, as Alan points out, companies that follow the letter and spirit of each of these five points will wind up with products and services that are similar to those that already exist. That's the Catch-22 of innovation: successful innovation is rarely the same thing as disruptive innovation. Alan clarifies this point below:

"Spotted the catch? Every step in this chain has a strong point to make. Put them all together, however, and you have a sure fire recipe for stifling conservatism. That's the trouble with innovation. Each obstacle represents a risk, and the more obstacles there are, the more risky it becomes. Exponentially so. Yet, at the same time, it's precisely the obstacle clearing that creates customer excitement, builds new brands and propels revenue and profit growth.

Is there a way round this dilemma? Probably not. But there may be ways to blunt the sharpness of its horns. One big influence on this front is Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who observed that successful companies miss out on many big innovation opportunities because they focus on their customers. By definition, customers are customers because they like what you are doing. So if you ask customers what they want, they're likely to say "more of the same". That leaves everyone else - people who are not so enamoured of what you are doing - out of the frame. These are the people who propel "disruptive innovators" to fame and fortune..."

(Hat tip: Chris Lawer)

Tags: innovation marketing AlanMitchell

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Innovation of the week: Flavor Tops

This week, the big buzz in the innovation world has been the so-called Cloak of Invisibility. Yet, there's another innovation that could have a far more disruptive impact on Corporate America: Flavor Tops that can turn a bottle of water into any other type of drink (including, yes, beer or wine):

"Donald Spector, Chairman of Innovation Fund LLC, announced today that it has patented and developed technologies that will allow consumers to screw one of its Flavor Tops caps onto any bottle of water and turn it into a vast variety of beverages. A consumer can take their favorite brand of plain bottled water, like Poland Spring (from Nestlé), and with a Flavor Tops cap turn it into a power drink, a soft drink, tea, or even an alcoholic beverage. These technologies can be used with concentrated powders, like Crystal Light, a brand of Kraft, liquids, or contain multiple product combinations. The caps can also be used for maintaining freshness of vitamins, additives or medications..."

The possibilities here are endless - the press release hints that non-beverage companies like Nike could compete with Coke and Pepsi by licensing the technology for new sports drinks. The U.S. military might also be interested in these Flavor Tops for troops stationed abroad. It's also, ahem, likely that major alcoholic beverage companies might find a way to target college fraternities across America with twist-off Flavor Tops (Early morning classes on Friday? Get a head start on your party weekend with these lime-flavored Corona Flavor Tops!)

Anyway, Donald Spector is the Chairman of the New York College of Health Professions in addition to being the head of the New York-based Innovation Fund, so there's apparently some scientific basis behind all of this. In addition, it looks like the Innovation Fund has partnered in the past with a number of Fortune 500 companies, including Disney, Pfizer, Revlon and Bristol-Myers Squibb. The Flavor Tops product line should be ready for launch in early 2007.

Tags: innovation FlavorTops

[Images: Poland Spring and Corona, via Flickr]

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The innovation machine

Yann Gouvennec of the Marketing & Innovation blog points to a new Corporate Innovation Machine whitepaper from Jeffrey Baumgartner, the founder of the jpb.com group of companies and the developer of the Jenni idea campaign management software:

"[Baumgartner] is posting a whitepaper on his website describing how you can set up an innovation strategy for your corporate organisation. He entitled this methodology the innovation machine. The picture on the cover (see it reproduced here under) is hilarious but as often with funny things, it is also very explicit when it comes to describing the innovation process. A must read..."

Tags: innovation strategy

[image: The Corporate Innovation Machine

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May 31, 2006

How to overcome innovation inertia

Bruce Stewart, a former CEO and onetime SVP and director of executive services at Meta Group, shares some insights about IT innovation from the front lines. As Stewart explains, many IT employees would like to work on innovative projects but, instead, get bogged down in the daily grind. With that in mind, Stewart lists four excuses about innovation that he often hears before offering his take on how to overcome this innovation inertia within IT organizations:

Excuse #1: "The user won't pay to replace anything, so we have to just keep fiddling with what we already have."

Excuse #2: "We just can't get agreement among all the groups involved to do anything really interesting with this set of applications."

Excuse #3: "We've got lots of good ideas, but the business won't let us into their thinking where we could do some good."

Excuse #4: "I'm in infrastructure, so I just do what I'm told."

The takeaway lesson? "The right to be innovative requires that the basics get changed first. Credibility must be built. You have to show that you speak the language of business (economic or financial analysis), that you understand risk and how to manage it, that you can bring disagreements out in the open and work toward resolutions, and that you are willing to work at a long-term effort to improve the relationship."

Tags: innovation IT

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New York City in 2016

Ever wonder what New York City will look like 10 years from now? New York Magazine has put together a comprehensive feature on New York City in 2016, complete with stunning photos of a changing skyline; details of exciting new development projects (i.e. the High Line, the transformation of the Fresh Kills landfill); and speculation about new transportation marvels (i.e. Santiago Calatrava's sky tram to Governor's Island). While many of these plans could get bogged down in bureaucratic turf wars (just look at what happened to the Ground Zero redevelopment efforts), it's likely that New York City will look and feel very different a decade from now:

"This is Tomorrowland—a new city, a city larger than San Francisco, built on top of the city we know. In ten years, New York City will be transformed in ways we can only guess at... In 2016, we won’t be able to be so parochial anymore—one Times Square isn’t going to be enough to fulfill the entertainment needs of that bigger, younger, more diverse population, and you’ll be talking about the lights on 125th Street. Fresh Kills will be three times the size of Central Park. If you imagine the city as a play—every neighborhood has a role—a lot of understudies are finally going to be called onstage...

And New York is—finally—getting greener. Mandated green city buildings, new sustainable towers in Battery Park City. Community groups dream of more green buildings on the ruins of the Sheridan Expressway. What is fascinating is the recovery and recycling of the works of the city’s greatest bogeyman, Robert Moses. He was responsible for the last great era of park building in the city, but he also sliced apart neighborhoods with highways and towers. Today’s mini-Moseses are combining his initiatives, building parks on the neighborhoods his roadways isolated, transforming infrastructure into landscape architecture. It is on the long-ignored waterfront that the most amazing transformation is occurring.

Sprinkled like jewelry across this new city fabric are projects, some fabulous, some already outdated, by both the dinosaurs and fledglings of the architectural pantheon. Yes, we’re getting our Gehry (one, two, three, four, maybe more), but also our Morphosis, our ShoP, our TEN Arquitectos. But often in some peculiar locations. Piano across from the Port Authority? Gehry in Brooklyn? Viñoly by the Williamsburg Bridge? The New York of 2016 doesn’t husband all the new design ideas in Manhattan but spreads them out.

Tags: NewYork innovation

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The gravanity factor

About three years ago, trend-spotting site TrendWatching.com first identified how gravanity - the desire of consumers to create customized goods and services bearing their own names or likenesses - would lead to a raft of new product innovations:

"As Warhol predicted with "15 minutes of fame", hundreds of millions of individuals are craving immortality, or at least some public attention. Whether it’s blogging, participating in Big Brother, having a character in a novel named after you, or adorning your car with personalized license plates, the masses want their names out there. This is where graffiti meets vanity to form gravanity: an entire industry catering to the obsession of ordinary citizens wanting to leave ‘something’ behind in print, audio or imagery, preferably in the public domain. Consider it a 21st century version of university libraries and hospital wings being named after the rich ruling classes.

Gravanity offers a host of opportunities for entrepreneurs willing to (re)name their goods and services, however small, on behalf of eager customers. Trendwatching.com predicts museums selling sponsorships of even the smallest works of arts (or just the frames!), theatres offering gravanity space on each seat, real estate developers auctioning off the rights to have apartment buildings and lobbies adorned with the names of middle-class families, and Domino’s introducing pizzas named after cash-rich, attention-poor pizza lovers who will reveal their favourite toppings to the world. If it can have a name attached to or printed on it, it WILL sell!"

As an example, Trendwatching's companion site Springwise recently pointed to a Brooklyn artist who will create personalized online avatars from personal photographs:

"Based in Brooklyn, graphic artist Lina Chen creates digitally illustrated portraits. Working from photographs, her black and white images are stylized likenesses of their subjects. The finished product is a digital file, delivered as a vector image, which lets customers enlarge their portrait without losing image quality. In a small size, digi-portraits make excellent avatars or buddy icons. Prices depend on a portrait's complexity."

Tags: gravanity trend avatar

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Design 2.0 event in San Francisco

Just a reminder that Core77's Design 2.0 event will take place in San Francisco on June 6. Similar to the Design 2.0 event that took place in New York earlier in the year, this event will focus on the intersection of design, strategy and innovation. An A-list panel of participants - including Peter Rojas (Engadget) and Diego Rodriguez (Stanford, IDEO and Metacool) - will discuss the power of context in product innovation. Here's a brief summary of the event from the Design 2.0 site:

"Products exist in a vast, often-messy environment of services, brands, cultures and competitors. But successful companies are realizing that deliberately and strategically designing products for the context in which they live can result in more imaginative, better integrated, and ultimately more humane offerings. From MP3 players and gaming consoles to kitchen appliances and office furniture, this panel discussion will focus on how to incorporate holistic thinking into product development, creating objects that are not only sensitive to their surroundings, but often define them."

To register for the event, click here.

Tags: Design2.0 innovation product ecosystem

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The globalization of innovation

Egils Milbergs of the Accelerating Innovation blog has posted a brief review of a recent Booz Allen Hamilton/INSEAD report on the globalization of innovation:

"Research and innovation will become more globally distributed according to a new survey conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton and INSEAD. The growing attention to strengthening home country R&D, human capital and innovative capacity is not slowing down plans of multinational corporations to invest more R&D in overseas sites. The survey found that a growing percentage of new R&D sites planned over the next three years will be located in either China or India."

For the full Booz Allen Hamilton/INSEAD report, click here.

Tags: innovation globalization R&D

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May 30, 2006

May 30 Innovation linkage

Cognitive bias in new product development [BusinessPundit.com]
The importance of creative procrastination [Powazek: Just a Thought]
Highlights from the Overlap un-conference [Functioning Form]
More highlights from the Overlap event [All this chittah-chattah]
The Bonfire of the Brands [AdRants]
"The New Steel" campaign highlights innovation [Wall Street Journal]
TypePad & Skype go together like... [Six Apart]
Timelines of trends and events (1750 to 2100) [FuturesWatch.org]
Do-it-yourself government budgets [Guardian Unlimited]

[image: The University of Otago Innovation Centre via Flickr]

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The Venture Voice Startup Workshop

Gregory Galant, the entrepreneur behind Venture Voice (a top-ranked business podcast on iTunes), recently announced the creation of the Venture Voice Startup Workshop in New York City:

"Venture Voice has been illuminating entrepreneurship through the podcast for just short of a year. Now, at the Venture Voice Startup Workshop on June 26 in New York, you can interact with top entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to find out how to start and grow innovative businesses. Venture Voice, a podcast known for asking the hard questions about entrepreneurship, brings together highly successful speakers who’ve gotten their hands dirty growing businesses. This full-day event will be intense. Participants will leave with tactical knowledge about growing a business and with the inspiration to do so."

Over at Venture Voice, you can listen to audio clips from some of the people who will be speaking at the workshop. If you're in New York City (or the Hamptons) in late June, it's worth checking out the event. In previous podcast shows, Greg has interviewed Dave Sifry of Technorati, Shoba Purushothaman of The NewsMarket and David Sacks, co-founder of PayPal.

Tags: innovation startup venturecapital

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Five steps to market and sell "know-how"

Michael Osofsky, a Palo Alto-based innovation blogger, shares five tips for packaging, marketing and selling innovation "know-how." The key step, according to Michael, is making this "know-how" somehow tangible:

"Given the nebulousness of selling intangibles, Suzanne Harrison (author of Einstein in the Boardroom) coined the term i-Stuff. To shed i-Stuff of this stigma, one idea is to package it with manuals and other tangible material that helps define what the know-how is. People understand exchange of funds for tangible goods, so to the extent to which you can make the intangible seem tangible helps bridge the gap.

If you don’t have a unique name for you know-how, name it, make it a “thing” that people can talk about. A three-letter acronym can be good, but another thing to think about is a name that communicates the value-proposition of the know-how. What problem does it solve? What benefit does it impart if you have it? From what I’ve heard, it can be difficult to sell know-how because your buyer may have trouble admitting they don’t know what you know. By packaging it, you give them a way to pitch it to their boss without making it sound like the valuable part they’re buying from you is the knowledge. Help your buyer save face."

Michael also outlines four other steps in marketing and selling "know-how":

** Cast it as a capability

** Identify benefits

** Find a distribution channel

** Search for buyers in other industries

Tags: innovation knowhow istuff

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Biological ecosystems and innovation

Joel Barker, the futurist and innovative thinker who popularized the concept of "paradigm shifts" for the corporate world, emphasizes that business leaders can learn a lot about innovation by understanding the parallels with biological ecosystems. For example, much of innovation within nature takes place on the verge, far away from the center of the ecosystem. The same is true within corporations, where many breakthrough innovations take place on the edges.

Building on the some of the ideas from Five Regions of the Future: Preparing your Business for Tomorrow’s Technology Revolution, Joel Barker recently shared his thoughts about innovation and biological ecosystems with Optimize Magazine. According to Barker, it's important to get outside your ecosystem: "Leave the paradigm you know well, and go visit alternative paradigms. Seeing how other paradigms solve problems similar to your own can teach you new ways of looking at your intractable problems." It's also important to learn from the biological ecosystems model:

"Ecological research shows that Mother Nature does her most radical innovations as far away from intense competition as possible. In the center of the ecosystem where competition is highest, if you try a breakthrough idea and it fails, you’re eaten. The only thing you can do safely in the center is incremental innovation. Mother Nature innovates most radically at the edge of the ecosystem, where it bumps up against another. This shared edge is called a verge.

When you go to the verge, you encounter things you ordinarily don’t bump into. Just take a look at Apple Computer. It went to the verge and created a breakthrough innovation. The computer industry bumped up against the music industry to create the iPod. The safest place to try breakthrough innovation is as far away from the competition as you can get."

Tags: innovation verge JoelBarker ecosystem

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Why the CEO lies about innovation

Technology evangelist Guy Kawasaki continues his "Top 10 lies" series with the Top Sixteen Lies of CEOs. What does it really mean when the CEO says that "your project will be a skunkworks reporting directly to me”? Well, it's probably not good news for your project team: "This means that no one else at the management level buys into the idea. The CEO might protect you - as this lie implies. Or, you may be fighting for your life against the naysayers when the CEO moves on to the next brilliant idea du jour."

It's also worth checking out #10 on the list: "I’m open to new ideas." According to Guy, "the CEO must have recently read a book by a management guru. She’s certainly open to her own new ideas. She’s probably open to new ideas from the consultants that she hired at $10,000/day. Maybe she read a new idea in a blog, God help us. The relevant question is whether she’s open to new ideas from the rank-and-file employees who really know how to fix the company..."

Tags: innovation CEO GuyKawasaki

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The rise of consumer-generated advertising

The Putting People First blog points to a story in the New York Times about the rise of consumer-generated advertising. Companies like Converse, GM and MasterCard have asked for, and received, contributions to their marketing efforts from grassroots contributors. Perhaps the most famous consumer-created ad - a computer animation of flying iPods made by a California teacher- was made and distributed without any input from the makers of the product. Pointing to the success of the "Firefox Flicks" ad contest, the article highlights the significance of the consumer-generated advertising trend:

"Grant McCracken, an author, anthropologist and consultant, takes a broader view, describing consumer involvement as a kind of branding Reformation: marketing professionals used to be the high-priest gatekeepers, but now we can all have a direct relationship with the Almighty Brand. He refers to this as brand "co-creation" (a term he credits to C.K. Prahalad, a business professor at the University of Michigan), and sees it as both inevitable and smart, even in the case of the Chevy Tahoe controversy. "The era of the brand that's blandly constructed and hopes not to offend anyone — to be pleasant — that notion is really dead," McCracken says.

But why do consumers want to get involved in this co-creation? "They want to because they can," McCracken says, meaning that both the technological tools and a deeply ingrained knowledge of advertising grammar are now widely dispersed. "And some of them can do it really, really well."

Tags: brand cocreation innovation advertising

[image: New York Times]

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