Innovation feeder


Piers has called the Emperor’s bluff and now he’s naked
February 8, 2008, 6:20 am
Filed under: Advertising, Gen Research & Info sites, Innovative Research Methods, Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends, Looking for insights, Trendy Trend sites | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Piers has called the Emperor’s bluff and now he’s naked . . . . Here’s a sneak but check it out for yourself, it’s a good post.

There’s something wrong in the trends business. It’s broken. It’s broken by lack of imagination, lack of collaboration and secrecy. Below we’ve listed some major areas that need fixing, not for our competitive sake, but for an industry to evolve and become useful enough to inspire its clients to make things better.

Trends services have an unhealthy reliance on control, restriction of information and perception. Trends companies put up gates that guard this mystical information that somehow only they could gather. This presentation from Henley Center’s d_Code is an example of how the trends industry attempts to scare companies into thinking how little they know. There’s no explanation of why d_code knows better, just that they somehow know a lot more than you do (and they’ve got the graphic designer to prove it). AgencySpy gave this great reaction to the presentation in 2007:

“No ideas. No dissection of new cultural movements to help you on your way. No outlay of creatives, organizations, thinkers that are shaking up the underground to shape the future. Nada. Every one of their clients should feel like they just got punk’d.”

0 Comments


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: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

feeder-18-33-04.jpg

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?

(more…)

3 Comments


What people are doing online
February 1, 2008, 4:27 am
Filed under: Beg steal or borrow, Digital Strategy & Techno-culture, Future of Media, Futures, Geek stuff, Gen M, Gen Y, Innovative & emergent media, Innovative Work Practice, Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends, Macro trends, Social media, Social networking innovation, Trends stuff, content communities, creativity | Tags: , , , , ,

online.jpg

I tend to take in information best with my peepers, I’m not great at listening [although I try very hard] and I really like to see things mapped out rather than a huge truckload of words. Which is why I love a good model, a good graph, schematic display - anything which represents information in a stimulating visual way. So here’s another one. This one comes courtesy of Business Week, spotted by one of Max’s colleagues & posted on his blog Experience The Message in the middle of last year. It’s a stormer for presentations & workshop stimulus so eat up friend.

You can check out Max’s original post here

The original Business Week article can be found here

3 Comments


Beta goes meta: From innovation to trend in a heartbeat
January 31, 2008, 11:20 pm
Filed under: Brand, Community, Digital Strategy & Techno-culture, FMCG innovation, Future of Media, Geek stuff, Innovation, Innovative & emergent media, Innovative Design, Innovative Work Practice, Innovative marketing, Lifestyle trends, Macro trends, Social media, Social networking innovation, Thinking & Planning, beta, content communities, creativity, geek, neophiliac, new product development | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
A great post by CNET blogger Tim Leberecht taken from Matter/Anti Matter.
Innovation isn’t limited to R & rooms anymore. The Web 2.0 movement–powered by start-ups such as Twitter, Malhalo and even YouTube, has proven that innovation often happens in iterations. Build, launch, tweak, measure, repeat. Digital experiences seem to be ‘always in beta’–learning and evolving along the way.
beta cultr

The idea of being in beta has become a broad cultural phenomenon. Many new products never make it beyond trial stage, and the trial and error beta-approach that helps Google and other alpha innovators to out-fail and thereby out-innovate the competition, is as much an attribute of successful organizations as it is a sign of our time.

But it’s not only analysts and conference organizers who are switching instantly from micro to macro, picking up nascent trends and elevating them to a must-deal-with core competence that transcends the current fad (just see all the Facebook conferences that are mushrooming right now). What I find even more interesting is how the media and blogosphere deal with it. If everything’s in beta, the public doesn’t have the patience anymore to wait for the alpha. As the media are increasingly forced to immediately widen the scope and view every innovation in a larger context as it occurs, the boundaries between reporters and commentators, bloggers and industry analysts are fading.

Some examples: Not too long ago, Twitter was all the rage, and it was stunning to see that just shortly after the initial coverage during SXSW in March, reporters were already elaborating on the concept of micro-blogging, wondering what the new “radical transparency” meant for business. Nowadays, there is a great chance that you will stumble upon a Facebook story when you open just about any publication: It’s Facebook vs. MySpace, the implications of social networking on the borders between work and personal life, reflections on the “Facebook economy,” Facebook vs. iTunes, and maybe a philosophical piece on Facebook “as a post-modern book” or the future of social networking, which, for TIME, equals the future of the Internet. It is only a small step from MySpace to the “MySpace generation,” and from Facebook to the “Facebook generation” and then to the “Fakebook generation.” Similarly, the recent buzz around Radiohead’s “pay what you want” online release has instantly led to the coining of a “Radiohead Generation” and praise for the band “as a pioneer of the digital revolution.” And there are hundreds of articles discussing if Radiohead’s decision ushers in the definite end of the record industry. The stories about the radical distribution model appear to eclipse the actual music on the album–in this case, too, the reviews are in before the story is told.

Evidently, the media need to cope with the current while also putting forward a vision for the up and coming. The time between observation and conclusion, between description and prediction, however, has shrunk to almost zero. There are no more lapses between news, analysis, background story, industry trend story, and intellectual dissection; they have become one and the same, at the same time. Not only is beta the new alpha–beta has gone meta.

0 Comments


The Information Architects release the 2008 web trends map in beta
January 30, 2008, 11:07 pm
Filed under: Beg steal or borrow, Digital Strategy & Techno-culture, Future of Media, Google, Innovative Design, Innovative designers, Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends, Social media, Thinking & Planning, Trends stuff, Trendy Trend sites | Tags: , , , , ,

ia-webtrend-map-08.jpg The Information Architects, a strategic design agency in Tokyo, Japan have just released the beta version of their 2008 web trends map. They’ve taken 300 of the most influential and successful websites & pinned them down to the greater Tokyo-area train map. Needless o say Google remains at the centre of the universe [or in this case Tokyo] with various ‘train’ lines such as ‘Social Networks’ line, ‘Game Technology’ line, Adobe & File Sharing lines.

It’s a beautiful thing for the mind & the eyes.

Check it out here

1 Comment


Top ten Epicurious foodie predictions for 2008
January 10, 2008, 11:54 pm
Filed under: FMCG innovation, Food trends & info, Lifestyle trends, Trends stuff | Tags: , , , ,
Here’s another fun prediction piece for 2008; this time it’s from foodie bible Epicurious. These prediction articles are fun to skim over for inspiration but more to the point, they make great quick ‘n’ easy stimulus for innovation workshops when you’ve run out of insightful platforms ;).
Article taken from Epicurious
by Tanya Steel
1) Farmers are the New Celebrity Chefs: With more celebrity chefs than we can shake a spatula at, it’s now time to salute the farmer and make him or her famous, rich, and, no doubt, host of a reality show.
2) Fancy Frozen Yogurt is the new Designer Cupcake: Some designer cupcakes taste great, like those from New York’s Magnolia Bakery–but many are small, dry, and flavorless. The FroYo trend, however, shows no signs of slowing, with lines around the block at spots like Pinkberry, The Big Chill and Naked Berry. Exotic ice cream flavors push the envelope and set the bar, with spicy flavors like wasabi, nuanced juxtapositions like blueberry cheesecake, ultra-seasonal influences like pumpkin in October, and new dairy twists like creme fraiche, goat’s milk, or sour cream.
3) Meatballs are the New Hamburger Sliders: Sliders are on lots of menus but while some mini hamburgers can be tasty, most end up dry and tough. Tiny hamburgers will soon be replaced by high-end meatballs like those made from duck at New York’s A Voce and veal at Washington D.C.’s Brasserie Beck.
4) Cambodian is the New Thai: A triangulation between Vietnamese, Chinese, and Thai cooking, Cambodian’s emphasis on noodle dishes, curries, stir fries and prahok, the strong-flavored fish paste, will grow in popularity. Cambodian food has stronger flavors than Vietnamese, slightly more subtle that Thai and is not as heavy as Chinese.

(more…)

0 Comments


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

1 Comment


Innovative restaurant :: Guerilla dining
September 21, 2007, 8:35 am
Filed under: Community, Gypsy, Innovative marketing, Innovative restaurants, Lifestyle trends, Social networking innovation

MELBOURNE’S hottest restaurant isn’t in The Age Good Food Guide, it changes location weekly, and with a waiting list of 4000, it’s booked out for the next year.

Zingara Cucina — Italian for “Gypsy Kitchen” — is Australia’s first “underground” restaurant. It is unlicensed, illegal and transient, but has won the kind of word-of-mouth accolades most legitimate establishments only dream about.

And with the identity of the people behind it a secret, it’s also the city’s biggest culinary mystery.

It began almost three years ago when dinner parties held for friends by the operator and chef developed a cult following. Now, Zingara has developed into a weekly dining experience, roaming inner-city locations from car parks to lanes, rooftops, bridges, beaches and galleries.

The chef will not reveal his identity except to say he is not a professional, was taught to cook by his Italian grandmother and mother, and works in an advertising agency during the day. He says that “fine dining has become boring”.

“The whole concept is around conviviality and creating that feeling you get when you have a nice meal with like-minded people. It’s not about making money, but about enjoying good food and good wine,” he says.

Entry is by invitation only — each guest gets two referrals to pass on to friends — and diners are told the location via email or SMS the night before.

A diner who has experienced Zingara Cucina — he asked to remain anonymous, although he will reveal he is a chef at a well-regarded CBD restaurant — described the experience as “phenomenal”.

“I’d go once a week if I could, to be frank, because it’s an incredible experience … the presentation, the food, which was as good as any two or three-chef’s-hat restaurant in Melbourne.”

At this particular dinner, held several months ago in an obscure city lane, guests were fed rustic Italian fare including handmade ravioli in sage butter with crushed pinenuts, and whole suckling pig — “all really simple flavours that were extrapolated in a beautiful way” — and serenaded between courses by an opera singer.

The diner estimates the meal would have cost $150 in any other restaurant, although Zingara diners are asked to pay what they see fit.

Story taken from The Age

There is also a gypsy  kitchen in the US which does a similar thing - Gypsy Dinners

0 Comments


what’s your digital footprint?
September 11, 2007, 7:26 am
Filed under: Digital Strategy & Techno-culture, Geek stuff, Gen M, Gen Y, Google, Innovation, Innovative & emergent media, Lifestyle trends, Social networking innovation, Trends stuff, lifestreaming, technorati

bloggermania is here. in fact, you know it’s here because every tom, dick and barry has a blog, according to technorati there’s a new blog being created every second or was that every half second…and then there’s twittermania. for those of you who haven’t succombed to twitter, it combines IM-ing, social networking & mobile technology. twitter members can send short messages to their twitter network about what they’re doing or where they’re at…exciting isn’t it? now you can keep up with what your mates are doing every second of every  day.

whilst twitter seems a little well..time filling & stalker-ish,  think about it in the wider context of communicating online…the average geekhead has videos on youtube, photos on flickr, a blog on blogger, wordpress or typepad, maybe even a moblog, possibly a twitter network, del.ic.ious tags, they’re digg.ing and probably posting palava at myspace. which begs the question….

if a person exists in the world without a digital footprint, do they really exist and how would we know?

0 Comments


Innovative restaurant marketing
September 5, 2007, 8:36 am
Filed under: Community, Futures, Innovation, Innovative companies, Innovative marketing, Innovative promotions, Lifestyle trends, Macro trends, Social innovators & entrepreneurs, Social networking innovation, Social ventures, Urban lifestyles, australia, creativity

In Surry Hills one guy is reinventing the idea of the evening meal by opening his space for a weekly gathering of friends & strangers. So grab yourself a seat, pass the wine & pitch in because this is neighbourhood dining at it’s very best.

There are thousands of normal restaurants in Sydney.
This is not one of them.

This innovative restaurant is run by a friend of mine locally in Surry Hills. The project is called Table for 20. The idea behind this project is to create a completely new experience in the dining market. Bucking the trend fancy restaurants & one hat wonders, this is family-orientated communal neighbourhood dining at its best. The restaurant is housed at 182 Campbell St in Surry Hills, in a building owned by Hope St, a local Surry Hills charity. 10% of the takings each night go to Hope St to support them in the work that they do with less fortunate people in the Surry Hills area.

The experience plays out as a neighbourhood supper where local people come & pay a modest set fee to dine at the communal tables.
As is Michael Fantuz’s specialty, the food is festive Italian with a twist. Fantuz is a man who clearly loves his food and can constantly be seen
running up and down tables dishing out a vintage olive oil or rare Buffalo Mozzarella or even a plum mustard which we enjoyed on the night we were
there. The food is undoubtedly exceptional, but unlike other restaurants, Fantuz shuns the idea of food reviewers and would instead prefer them to
come & make a contribution to the mission. “I have no need for fancy hats or stars” Fantuz says, “I’ve finally found an opportunity to do what I love and
help out people along the way.”

The $40 - $50 meal includes three courses - a starter, main and dessert. If you’re lucky, you’ll arrive on one of the nights where Michael’s mother has been
commissioned to create her famous homemade Tirimisu. It’s certainly worth the wait!

Anyone who lives in Sydney will agree there’s no shortage of good restaurants but the one thing the 2010 area was really lacking was somewhere low key where you can just come and have a feed, open a bottle of wine, meet a few people and have a laugh. Sometimes people get so caught up in their day-to-day lives that they just stick to their immediate groups because that they have time for. Social isolation or social poverty is a symptom of the times we live in.

So Table for 20 is a weekly gathering of friends and strangers, locals in your hood. It also throws open the doors for a few of the Hope Street guys who would not normally have the opportunity for a night out at a restaurant. It gives them a chance to interact with other locals from the neighbourhood, and feel part of the wider community. It’s nice to see an innovative self sustaining social ventures rather than just a new brand of salty snacks isn’t it…

Check out the blog & join us for dinner :: http://www.tablefor20.blogspot.com

0 Comments

previous »