Innovation feeder

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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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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Whilst I’m in the sharing mode, check out this stormer of a site. It’s called Creax and it’s basically a hub of creativity & innovation sites. It includes some fantastic links, many of which cover social research, innovation tools, trend sites and science resources. Some of the sites I’d seen before but many were new to me. This is one site you most definitely want on your resources blogroll.

You can find it here

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

Just saw this posted this morning & had to share it. It’s a periodic table of all the visualisation methods you’ll ever need as a strategic planner or innovation type person. (Well, maybe almost).

Check it out here

Every time I’ve searched for places to post my freelance details online I’ve come up with nothing. Nada. Zip. Nil. Now I know there are freelance directory sites for film peeps, creatives & designers and recruiters (not that I want to register at a recruitment site), but I can’t find anything for strategists, people who work in innovation - a general Australian freelancers directory. So I made one this afternoon.

The URL is www.australianfreelancers.wordpress.com

So if you’re self-employed, a freelancer or a small co-op, please do check it out and drop me a line if you’d like to list your details. This is not a money making exercise (obviously) but just aimed at connecting freelancers & giving us somewhere to put our bios online (aside from our blogs, facebook, myspace, linkedin etc etc). And if you’re looking for freelancers check it out too, although it’s quite a sad sight at the moment with just a friend and myself in the directory. If you know of anyone else who might find this useful, please pass the link on to them too.

many thanks & best, Jen

To find inspiration for innovation we need to hunt & gather in new ways

To be truly innovative, we have to force ourselves to look at the world differently. We have to be curious about new perspectives & new interpretations because they help us break away from the norm. By exposing ourselves to new ways of thinking and hunting for trends & ideas in other areas outside our traditional category space it allows us to return to the business and make genuinely new connections.

Let’s say you’re looking to innovate within the computer hardware market. Instead of asking people how they feel about their computers or how they feel about Apple vs PC or technology in general, what if you asked them about a time when their computer really let them down or saved their life? what if you asked them why it felt different using their own computer versus someone else’s? or what kind of car brand their computer feels like?

It’s much more productive to ask consumers a bunch of different questions which encourage storytelling around the product rather than going for the marketing jugular and trying to get people to explain how they feel about your product specifically.

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Few would deny that media play a central role in the livs of today’s children and adolescents. Their homes, indeed their bedrooms, are saturated with media. Many young people carry miniaturized, portable media with them wherever they go. They comprise the primary audience for popular music;
they form important niche audiences for TV, movies, video games, and print media (each of these industries produces extensive content targeted primarily at kids); they typically are among the early adopters of personal computers (indeed, of most new media) and are a primary target of much of the content of the
World Wide Web. that connect to the Internet and do most of what any digital screen will do.
Here’s a great report on Generation M:  media habits in the lives of 8 - 18 year olds

As we all know, Gen Yers have grown up in a world where anything and everything can be custom made to exactly the way they want. Whether it a brand new made to order computer, or a pair of Nike running shoes with their name stitched in them, Gen Y loves having their personality expressed. The Mars Company recognized this concept when they launched a new online promotion for M&Ms candy. The M&M website links to a site called, BecomeAnMM.com, prompting to visitors “There’s an M&M in everyone. Create an Inner M character that looks just like you!” After entering the site the user can create any kind of M&M they want, making it look like themselves, or a friend, allowing them to customize the shape, color, facial expression and best yet, accessorize! After creating your M&M you can continue to make more, or take your creation into a photo shop to place it in funny photos, make a movie out of it and play games. The viral capabilities are endless because the site will allow you to create as many custom candies as you desire and give the user plenty of options to e-mail the creations to whomever they’d like. After the recipient receives the message they are invited to create their own, hopefully sending their M&M to more people with them doing the same and so on.

Check it out :: Become an M&M

This story was written & borrowed from mindcomet