Innovation feeder


The next frontier: Design Thinking
March 19, 2008, 3:55 am
Filed under: FMCG innovation, Food trends & info, Future of Work, Innovation, Innovation Companies, Innovative Design, Innovative Research Methods, Innovative Work Practice, Innovative designers, Innovative stimulus, Looking for insights, new product development | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

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
February 26, 2008, 1:14 am
Filed under: Digital Strategy & Techno-culture, Future of Media, Future of Work, Geek stuff, Innovative Work Practice, Social media, Thinking & Planning, Trends stuff, geek | Tags: , ,

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?
February 13, 2008, 11:51 pm
Filed under: Digital Strategy & Techno-culture, Future of Work, Geek stuff, Gen M, Gen Y, Get another life, Innovation Companies, Innovative Research Methods, Innovative Work Practice, Looking for insights, Social media, Social networking innovation, creativity, geek, unbusiness | Tags: , , , , , , ,

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
February 7, 2008, 8:08 am
Filed under: Advertising, Agency structure, Future of Work, Geek stuff, Innovation, Innovative Research Methods, Innovative Work Practice, Innovative companies, Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends, Looking for insights, Macro trends, Thinking & Planning, Trends stuff | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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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?
January 25, 2008, 3:07 am
Filed under: A little genius, FMCG innovation, Future of Work, Innovative Work Practice, Innovative products we like, Innovative retail, Innovative stimulus, creativity, unbusiness | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

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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

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Here is Something To Talk About
January 16, 2008, 7:52 am
Filed under: Future of Work, Innovation Networks, Innovative Research Methods, Innovative Work Practice, Innovative companies, Innovative marketing, Social media, creativity, new product development | Tags: , , , , ,

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.

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Provocative Research :: Inspiration for Innovation
December 5, 2007, 7:03 am
Filed under: Future of Work, Innovation, Innovative Research Methods, Innovative Work Practice, Innovative stimulus, creativity | Tags: , , , , , , ,

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…)

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Interesting Snippets :: The way technology is changing our lives
November 6, 2007, 7:51 am
Filed under: Digital Strategy & Techno-culture, Future of Media, Future of Work, Geek stuff, Google, Innovative Research Methods, Innovative Work Practice, Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends, Mind candy, Research Presentations

1479883940_a891fb9df2.jpg“Interesting Snippets” is a flickr site for Lynette Webb, the Insights Manager at Google. She calls it “my personal dumping ground for various cool quotes, the odd stat, as slides to talk around when describing how things are changing online and in media & communications generally” and it’s jammed with a bunch of great stimulus about the way technology is changing the world in which we live.

It’s a Flickr collection online but she’s also published her slides in a book which you can buy on Lulu.

Check it out, it’s a must see Interesting Snippets

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As Technology Develops, So Does Role of Geek Marketers
September 6, 2007, 4:30 am
Filed under: Digital Strategy & Techno-culture, Future of Work, Geek stuff, Innovation, Innovative marketing, Trends stuff, creativity

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By Steve Rubel

Published: September 03, 2007

With the lazy days of summer officially behind us, now is when many start thinking seriously about their career plans. For those who are deeply interested in both technology and marketing, this is your time. A new kind of career is emerging: Enter the Geek Marketer.

While hard statistics are hard to come by, anecdotally I can tell you that dozens of Fortune 500 companies — including some of our clients — are recruiting Geek Marketers either from within or outside. That’s not their specific title, of course. However, it is their role.

With CEOs demanding accountability and time spent online climbing, chief marketing officers are on a push to embed technology into every facet of their strategy. But marketers and technologists are not exactly two peas in a pod. They speak different languages. Marketers like GRPs (gross ratings points). Geeks like APIs (application protocol interfaces). Dilbert mercifully pokes at these differences. It’s all very Mars and Venus.

Enter Geek Marketers. These cross-trained specialists are fluent in both worlds and bridge them. They are marketers by trade, yet they also have a hard-core interest in technology and social anthropology. As curious individuals, they are constantly studying how digital advances are changing our culture and media. Armed with these insights, they regularly apply them in a marketing context by working closely with brand teams to codify new best practices.

Geek Marketers create competitive advantage through rapid-fire testing and learning. The people I know in this role are shepherding the development, testing and measurement of all kinds of groundbreaking marketing programs. Their pilots span from the simple, such as building RSS feeds, to the complex, creating multifaceted community programs. Often they are paired with people like me, who are in a similar role on the agency side.

This may sound like the trendy occupation du jour, but something tells me the position has staying power. To be sure, the entire industry is innovating and everyone’s technical acumen is slowly rising. Still, Geek Marketers are freed to live just a little bit further out on the edge than most. And with no end in sight for what technology can do to transform business, they can continue to play a key role.

Article from Ad Age

Geek 2.0 image from Logic + Emotion

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Hang your balls out in the wind & try something new
August 28, 2007, 12:23 am
Filed under: Future of Work, Innovation, Innovation Companies, Innovative Work Practice, creativity, unbusiness

taipe.jpgAccording to Michael Porter the big cheese of marketing & business theory, competitive advantage is built on difference. Yet,companies are rushing toward sameness, fueled by “best practices” and incremental innovations. Why aren’t we looking at the “Most Innovative or Inventive Practice” as well? Why aren’t we looking at people doing it really differently? It’s much easier to do what everybody else has done because if it always looks like it should work and if it doesn’t, well it’s not your fault is it because it’s worked everywhere else so how could you have known…?

I think every strategic business review meeting should include a session at the end after the global best practice has been thoroughly reviewed and applied, a session w

here people celebrate those who hung their balls out in the wind to try something new. After all, innovation is hard and trying something completely new is even harder.

The people we’re most likely to learn from & be inspired by are the people who look at things differently. Who tried something new and it worked, or maybe it didn’t. Which is not to say there’s no value in BestPractice, of course there is value in something which has been tried and tested in other markets and worked. In some industry sectors and business areas, best practice makes the best sense. But when it comes to innovation, “Innovative Practice” is just as important.

That’s all.

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