Monthly Archives: June 2010
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the power of optimism and how it pertains to innovation and to issues like the Gulf Oil spill. This promises to be a long and rambling post, so suffice it to say that most innovators are optimists, and wouldn’t be innovators otherwise. Yet we have to balance the challenges that optimism introduces into the reality the world imposes. Look, for example, at the BP rig explosion. There. within a day or so of the explosion, we had a terrible outcome – oil spilling into the Gulf. However, BP and with some reluctance the Obama administration posited that the oil output into the Gulf was a mere 5000 barrels a day. As we now know, and most scientists hinted at for days after the explosion, that was an OPTIMISTIC estimate, based more on hope than facts. This optimistic viewpoint may have …
After the Boston edition of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, IBM’s Rawn Shah wrote a great follow-up post outlining ten observations from the event. A couple points that I found myself agreeing with wholeheartedly were: Adoption is about transforming human behaviors at work – More folks are starting to recognize that it is not trivial to bring communities and other social environments to life. ‘Let’s get beyond “adoption”’ – This was another sentiment I heard several times, but I attribute it to short-attention span. The general statement was ‘adoption’ was last-year’s thing, and we needed a new ‘thing’. The underlying philosophy of his post contrasts with that of Paula Thornton, who finds talk of driving adoption to be antithetical to the true nature of Enterprise 2.0. As she described in a post from several months ago: If you have to “drive adoption” you’ve failed at 2.0 design and implementation. The fundamentals … Continue reading
In order to thrive in a Participation Economy, traditional media outlets like newspapers and magazines will need transformational ideas. Especially when it comes to creating revenue in an age of free content. Of all companies, Starbucks might have happened upon just such an idea. Next month, the coffee giant will begin offering free wi-fi in all of its American locations. No big deal in this – but soon, Starbucks customers will also have unrestricted access to a variety of pay sites, including the Wall Street Journal. This is an innovative way of avoiding the dreaded “pay wall,” without giving content away gratis. Publishers get paid for their content, Starbucks gets to offer an exclusive service that will surely help sell more coffee, and customers save potentially hundreds of dollars in subscription fees. As we’ve seen, the emergence of the Participation Economy has been both good and bad for the media … Continue reading
Point: Monetize non-core innovation rather than pruning it. Story: Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox, discussed innovation at her company in an interview at the World Innovation Forum June 9, 2010. She described initiatives to improve the return on innovation at Xerox’s research centers such as PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). PARC’s ground-breaking inventions like the graphical user interface, ethernet, and postscript as inventions had a large impact on the world but didn’t contribute enough to Xerox’s bottom line. Let’s look at why that happened and what Xerox is doing now. Unpredictability lies at the core of the innovation process. Not only do innovators not know if an early-stage innovation will succeed or fail, they also can’t know all the possible applications or value latent in that innovation. Thus, it’s far too easy for an exciting innovation to stray outside the bounds of the company’s core competence. At some level, …
“All the news that’s fit to print” is the longstanding motto of The New York Times that has served them well. What a great brand. Fashion, sports, science, politics, sports, business, arts, travel, the arts, etc, it’s all in there and extremely high quality reporting every day. Incredible photography as well. They made the shift to online as elegantly as any of the major paper publishers and I believe that they will survive the growing trend of people not reading newspapers any more as shorter digital content becomes more prevalent. Do I think my son will ever have a paper delivered to his house? No. And I think the expression “it was in the paper Wednesday” will fade because we don’t think of news as the daily chunk that a newspaper is, we get our information from many sources throughout the course of the day. That’s just …
I need to get the word out about my business. I want to effectively reach my target audience and drive sales. Yesterday I was challenged by Todd Sattersten to justify why print ads beat social media for getting the word out. In this exercise, I have two venues to compare: (a) newspaper ads (b) social media venue (we’ll make it Twitter). Why A Newspaper Print Ad Beats Twitter Print Is Targeted I can choose to place an ad in the New York Times if my target is nationwide or in my town’s paper if it is locally relevant. I can direct (control) who sees my ad. The folks following me on Twitter are from all over the world. As far as I know, there isn’t a simple way to reach only the those in a particular market. Nor do I currently have a strong enough local base of followers. I … Continue reading
