Innovation feeder


Infomaniac? Check out this aggregator

alltop

If you’re an infomaniac and you haven’t seen Alltop then check it out now.

Started by “two guys and a gal” in a garage—or more accurately, one guy in home office (Will Mayall), one gal on a kitchen table (Kathryn Henkens), and one Guy in United 2B (Guy Kawasaki).

They describe it like this:

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — “aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, Muslim, celebrity gossip, military, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the headlines of the latest stories from dozens of sites and blogs.

You can think of an Alltop site as a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points—they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In other words, our goal is the “cessation of Internet stagnation” by providing “aggregation without aggravation.”



A little ditty for your next innovation workshop…
What if...

Another good piece of innovation stimulus from the lovely Lynette Webb,  Insights Manager at Google who created a Flickr site called “Interesting Snippets”. I’ve profiled her before and this is the latest image to her collection. It comes to us with a great quote from Russell Davies’ blog entry about Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it, Clay’s book is about what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures. When the traditional obstacles are broken down and we can all connect, engage and speak freely. What does this mean for the way we interact? For the way media publishers direct content? What happens when our unrestricted right to access, to connect and to speak is not only realised, but assumed?

It’s worth checking out Russell’s post on the book here

And if you haven’t read Clay’s blog you should definitely wet your whistle with a little of this



Another report from Bernard Salt…

For those of you data nerds who love a good bit of research, Bernard Salt and the smarties at KPMG have just released another ripping report titled ‘The Global Skills Convergence’.

‘In the report KPMG presents the thought-provoking notion that growth in the supply of skilled and unskilled labor in the developed world may slow in the next decade as Baby Boomers exit the workforce. More people exiting then entering the workforce leads to what author Bernard Salt describes as a ‘demographic faultline’.

Interestingly, one of the common themes emerging from the interviews in this study was the challenge of recruiting and retaining 20-somethings otherwise known as Generation Y.. here is a generation that requires – perhaps even demands– transparency of leadership and the development of individually tailored career plans.’

You can download the report from KPMG here



The next frontier: Design Thinking

Here’s another little ditty from Andrew Tan’s blog WhatIf which covers innovation & design from an Asian perspective. And no, he’s not part of the global outfit Whatif Innovation, he runs his own innovation company and this is his personal blog.

Design thinking is tnanobiker1.jpghe latest and hottest methodology talked about to help a company innovate. GE calls it CENCOR (calibrate, explore, create, organize and realize). The Mayo Clinic calls it SPARC (see, plan, act, refine, communicate). Andrew’s new company calls it GIP (Gather, Ideate, Prototype). Its most obvious and direct power is in the creation of new products and services. Design thinking allows an organization to differentiate its products and services in an avenue other than pricing.
Andrew’s method is not dissimilar to the IDEO method of industrial design, one which has nurtured some of the most popular innovations of the past few decades. Apple’s first mouse. Prada’s ultrahip Manhattan store. Stand-up toothpaste tubes that don’t get icky. The Palm V.
In the Ideo universe, great design doesn’t begin with a far-out concept or a way-cool drawing. It begins with a deep and empathic understanding of the human condition. The first step for any Ideo team on any project is to try to empathize with the people who might use whatever product or service that eventually emerges from its work. Ideo has crafted a set of systematic research methods for understanding what the firm calls “human factors.” It then goes on to develop ideas and from those ideas, prototypes which can be tested for real responses on real people.
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The Digital Curator in Your Future

A great post borrowed from Steve Rubel who writes Micropersuasion

Credit: Met by jesst7Content: it’s everywhere. Content is in your inbox, your feed reader, outdoor media, your living room, your pocket and, increasingly, on every web site you visit. It also increasingly resides on sites built and managed by your favorite brands, which are bypassing the media and going direct.

The democratization of publishing is without a doubt a revolution. When we’re all dead and gone, the 21st Century will be remembered as a Digital Renaissance – one that rivals the original that preceded it by 700 years.

The Internet has empowered billions of people and is distributing their creativity across millions of niches and dozens of formats. Quality and accuracy, of course, can vary. However, virtually every subject either is or will be addressed with excellence – by someone, somewhere.

However, the glut of content as we all know also has a major downside. Our information and entertainment options greatly outweigh the time we have to consume it. Even if one were to only focus on micro-niche interests and snack on bite-sized content, demand could never ever scale to match the supply. Content is a commodity. The Attention Crash is real and – make no mistake – it will deepen.

Enter the Digital Curator.

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Looking for innovation superstars?

I had brekky with a friend of mine this morning & amongst other things, we were talking about finding talent. He’s always on the lookout for people, I’m on the other side of the fence & always on the lookout for new freeelance opportunities. There’s a lot of people hunting for innovation consultants, innovation talent, researchers etc at the moment in Sydney. The market is abuzz with movement. People are moving around, everyone wants to know who’s free, who might come where & who’s looking for what. Anyway, this friend & I were talking about how innovation companies themselves are often not that innovative [ironically] when it comes to hiring. How they can talk innovation & have theories on innovation but when it comes to hiring practices, recruiting talent & looking for new blood, often their approach can be anything but.

As I was pondering this post-pancakes, I came across a couple of articles that speak to this topic brilliantly. So rather than bang on & paraphrase, I’ve just posted them here. Enjoy.

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Take me to your feeder

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Whether you work in advertising, marketing, innovation or new product development, one of the most difficult things is having to come up with new ideas & perspectives all the time. There’s often a mad scramble to find innovation examples, social commentary or macro trends when we have pitches on or a presentation due, but the reality is that this kind of information is most useful & valuable when it’s applied consistently throughout the entire working process.

When we’re exposed to a bunch of different points of view, different modes of thinking & different models of expressing that thinking, we approach things differently from the start. We interrogate the client’s brief in more detail, we set the boundaries for the strategy more decisively, we look for creative & strategic stimulus in places others may not necessarily have thought of & think outside the intellectual systems & structures that we would normally fall back on when we just ‘use what we have’ or even worse, ‘what we’ve done before’.

So why don’t companies take this kind of role more seriously? My guess is because it seems like a role that anyone could do & everyone should do. And they’re right. Except that nobody does. The reality is that every advertising planner or innovation strategist can read ten blogs a day, keep up to date on general social trends & emergent media & keep abreast of what the trendy trendspotters like to call ‘contemporary cultural zeitgeist’ but they don’t. It’s human nature to get bogged down in the projects piling up on our desk & the whoosh of the deadlines as they go rushing past. To jump from one mindset to another in normal day-to-day work is extraordinarily difficult. Of course it can be done, by any smartie pants in fact, the difference is that the state of mind needed to write clearly defined project presentations, manage clients & the creative process is quite different to the open-ended permanently curious & steadily expanding mindset of the researcher or the information geek. It’s almost as if one mindset is about connecting the dots (those who have a
formal planning or strategy role), whereas the other is about drawing new dots, which take a while to be connected, sometimes if at all.

The definition of a “Feeder” is one who stimulates people’s minds with a constant supply of new trends & ideas. At least that’s how the big cheeses at Business Week define it. So how can you get around this in your own company?

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What if we kept a record of all the random ideas we have?

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Looking for a bit of Friday folly to procrastenate over while I garner the energy for another crack at work this afternoon, I stumbled across a new blog called ‘What If They Did’ – it’s basically a bunch of ‘what if’ ideas, a collection of random thoughts across all categories & platforms.

At first I thought might be an informal blog from someone at WhatIf The Innovation Company, after all, it would sit perfectly under their banner as a way of creating dialogue beyond the company lines. But no, it’s actually written by two creatives out of London who are using it as a playground to stash their collection of random ideas.

So whether you’re after a wacky idea for a particular category, or simply want think more laterally about how you go about generating ideas, this site is worth a look.

I love this idea for a lucky dip on the Skye Remote Control and when you think about it, it’s not so different from the concept behind iPod’s shuffle.

Check it out here



Here is Something To Talk About

Not quite a year ago,  two men (one from Sydney and one from Iowa) asked people a question — would they like to write a business book. And over 100 people  responded from all over the world … contributing 400 words each to the book Age of Conversation.

Now they’ve decided to go ahead and do it again in 2008. They’re now looking for contributors for another collaborative publishing project.  They’ve come up with a short list of topics which are open to user voting:

  • Marketing Manifesto
  • Why Don’t People Get It?
  • My Marketing Tragedy (and what I learned)

You can go HERE to cast your vote (you have until the end of January to vote) or find out more about it through either Gavin or Drew.



Provocative Research :: Inspiration for Innovation

So what it is?

It’s a rich, colourful and most importantly, an alternative POV to stimulate innovation. It’s not 100% backed up by six

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ty tons of data, it’s a broad brushstroke picture created by a bunch of interesting and springy data sources that suggests change is afoot!

It’s not trend research, it’s not qualitative research, it’s extreme and alternative points of view that provoke change. This is not foundational research, it’s about connecting the dots. It’s inspiration for innovation.

Much of what companies do is incremental innovation. Small projects addressing an immediate need for a new telco bundle offer or a new snack bar. Provocation research takes us beyond incremental innovation. It looks to the future, forecasting trends (industry, social or macro where appropriate) to provide a richer context for the work of now.

It’s a more extreme view (disruptive) but it’s about taking the principles of the future of the category and of the consumer landscape, how they might change and be disrupted, and applying those principles to projects today. (more…)