Innovation [view: normal]

This hand-drawn "media wheel" shows what media people consume when and where, based on data points from a syndicated research. Here's how me made it.

'Tis the season to diss Apple in some very creative and entertaining ways. I'm just not sure whether it's a sign of strategic marketing insight, or fishbowl-like confusion of message over meaning.

I’ve been reading the book “Innovation Tournaments” by Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich of the Wharton School. The book sets out a methodology (the “tournament” of the title) for companies to generate and systematically winnow down innovation ideas to eliminate all but the most exceptional opportunities.

One of the best articles that I've read about innovation this week actually had absolutely nothing at all to do with business innovation -- at least on the surface. Hannah Karp of the Wall Street Journal recently took a closer look at When Snowboarders Baffle the Judges. Faced with the prospect of judges that are not always on top of radical new snowboarding techniques, innovative snowboarders lik...

Here's something I've been thinking about for some time now.

You see, there is this company.

It publishes over a hundred RSS feeds and several email newsletters, but not a single blog.

Here is an old vision of a high-tech future. It is an old magazine illustration in a 1969 Japanese Sunday magazine, which shows life in the future, pervaded by computers. This illustration “The Rise of the Computerized School,” by Shigeru Komatsuzaki is an illustrated scenario of what schools will be like in the future. Sort of Webex type of online delivery and interactive learning via a tablet.

This week Doc Searls posted on an idea called “Personal RFP.” In this model, people wishing to buy a product would be able to put together an open “request for proposal” – essentially, a specification for what they want to buy, including budget, and solicit bids from suppliers wanting to sell it to them. [Nothing even approximately like this exists today, except perhaps Priceline, the reverse-auction travel broker, which is full of compromises to the Personal RFP model.]

(NOTE: This essay draws on a chapter in my new book, Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs, which identifies nine radical branding and marketing insights for innovative business leaders to watch in 2010).

I'll admit to entering the halls of Greenbuild — the mammoth green building conference and expo, held last week in Phoenix — with a cynical theory: Greenbuild would be filled with greenwash. I assumed that with nearly 1,100 exhibitors, up 25% from the previous year amid a horrid economy, the U.S. Green Building Council, the event's organizers, had lowered its standards, accepting anyone that had a...

Social media can be many things: a place to network with friends, a way to follow market trends and monitor brand sentiment, a customer service tool for identifying unhappy customers. But is it a tool for demand generation? I believe the answer is yes, but that it requires a different mindset for lead generation and measuring ROI.

A quick “hats off” to David Brancaccio and NOW on PBS for their well-researched and informative documentary on what Denmark is doing to attain energy independence and get off oil by building a version of the Renewable Electron Economy that is suitable for their resource base.

Guest Post by: Charlie Osmond

Maclaren has become the latest victim of social media activism. They have joined a growing list of companies to have suffered at the hands of bloggers and Tweeters [Twitterers?].

Originally posted on the Collaboratory
From a holistic perspective, we talk about the need for organizations to become more socially calibrated—able to adapt and respond to changes both externally and internally. The three areas where emergent outcomes can manifest are, participation with your customers, collaboration between your employees and optimization in the interactions/transactions between your business and its partners. Digging into customer participation, it’s clear that in a networked economy customers demand engagement, information, support and ultimately, value and ecosystems such as Twitter are beginning to deliver here.

I find that people are over-concerned with online security every time there is a piece of news about identity theft on TV. It is really not that bad and we need to accept the fact that it will not go away. Whatever security mechanism being put can fix one hole but usually creates another hole.

I think there is a lot more to this discussion, more than about “just making things simple and easy to use”. Why are some objects simple and easy to use but end up limited and boring? Why are some objects, like the iPhone, simple to use but somehow able to have many layers of more complex functions? Is this what they call simplexity, or an “emerging theory that proposes a possible complementary re...

I recently conducted a webinar on 10 Strategies for Building a Credible Sustainable Brand in conjunction with Sustainable Life Media. While I'll never again agree to develop an hour's worth of new content with 1 week's notice (!), I appreciated the opportunity to pull together a fairly comprehensive set of strategies that help brands build credibility from the ground up and minimize the risk of gr...

JPMorgan Chase announced earlier this week that it plans to hire 1,500 new mortgage and small business bankers by the end of 2010. I think this is a tremendous branding opportunity.

"We have invested in new systems, aggressively grown our capacity and are now looking to increase our sales force," said its head of home lending in a statement reported on CNN.

“The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage,” by Roger Martin. 2009: Harvard Business Press, 190pp.

When did you read it? November 2009.

After cognitive decline, the physiological effects of ageing on eyesight are, in my view the most important for marketers to understand. Let's be honest, it is a subject that most marketers don't ever think about. This video makes a start to explain one facet of the problem - the decline in the eye's ability to distinguish colour contrast. This article provides a much more detail explanation of th...

Guest Post by: Maria Pergolino

Marketing automation has the ability to benefit almost every B2B company and industry, but are there benefits specific to open source companies? In our newest B2B marketing thought leadership interview, Mark Fidelman is the EVP of Sales at MindTouch and author of "Open Source Best Practices 2009" talks about open source success and using marketing automation to achie...

Piano Staircase:
”Take the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator and feel better” is something we often hear or read in the Sunday papers. Few people actually follow that advice. Can we get more people to take the stairs over the escalator by making it fun to do? See the results here.

Cynthia Kurtz starts off a recent blog post with a provocative statement: “Telling a story is not always the best way to tell a story.”

She continues:

The top story today was Rupert Murdoch sort of saying that News Corp might start using robots.txt on Google to prevent its stuff from being indexed. Or that's how it was interpreted on the internets anyway. Nevermind that he probably meant something different -- that News Corp will erect pay walls around its online content the way it now does with the Wall Street Journal: a headline and a paragrap...

(NOTE: This essay draws on a chapter in my new book, Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs, which identifies nine radical branding and marketing insights for innovative business leaders to watch as we roll into 2010).

The first thing that popped up on “must blog” list is another item about luxury.

According to a Luxury Institute study, summarized by AdWeek, state-of-the-market series, 77% of high-end shoppers "agreed that luxury is less important in today's economy."