Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM)
Smeal College of Business
The Pennsylvania State University
Webinar: Double Loop Marketing™: The New Online Strategy to Build Brand Awareness, Accelerate Demand & Generate Leads
Presenter: Christian Sarkar, Founder – Double Loop Marketing LLC
When: Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Time: 1:00pm EDT
Free One-Hour Web Event
Description: Double Loop Marketing™ is an emerging online strategy. The “Double Loop” approach requires a company to first develop “mind share” by building a company sponsored site that offers genuinely useful information and advice to consumers in the subject matter areas most relevant to their products. This is the first loop of the firm’s interaction with customers. Only after such a site achieves credibility among its community of visitors can the company, in the second loop of customer interaction, try to convert that “mind share” into “wallet share.”
Double Loop Marketing™ can yield surprising results – often 10 times the number of qualified sales leads generated by conventional advertising and marketing approaches.
In this webinar you’ll learn:
– Where to start: are you positioned in the right ecosystem?
– What is “Double Loop Marketing™?”
– Who is using it: surprise, it’s not just high-tech companies
– How it’s being used: case studies (B2B) from companies using “Double Loop Marketing™”
– The results: comparisons of effectiveness between traditional online advertising and double Double Loop Marketing™
– Barriers to execution: what separates success from failure?
– It’s not about technology: how blogs, RSS, and mobile applications play a role but are not the defining elements of Double Loop Marketing™
Sign up here >>
ExxonMobil: the Most Irresponsible Company on Earth?
– ExxonMobil is the world’s biggest publicly listed corporation – and one of the biggest polluters. A Friends of the Earth study found it responsible for 5% of all man-made carbon dioxide emitted over the past 120 years.
– In 2001 the White House thanked it for its ‘active involvement’ in crafting US global warming policy, describing it as ‘among the companies most actively … opposed to binding approaches to cut greenhouse gas emissions’.
– In 2005 a record 28.3% of its shareholders voted to recommend that ExxonMobil review how it will meet greenhouse gas reduction targets in countries participating in the Kyoto Protocol. Exxon’s board ignored the vote.
– When asked about global warming by the Wall Street Journal in March, outgoing ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson replied: ‘At a minimum, there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty around this whole question.’
This is brand suicide.
What is with these people? For a contrast between BP and Exxon, see here >>
How Software Platforms Revolutionize Business
From HBSWK –
“You can’t see them, but we’ve all used “software platforms” over the last few decades, whether they are embedded in the Windows operating system, a cell phone, or game machine. In a new book, the authors term software platforms “invisible engines that have created, touched, or transformed nearly every major industry for the past quarter century.”
“Think of software platforms as ring leaders of ecosystems in which a few or many companies can participate to reach users. These core products, like Windows, for example, offer software services that can be used as the basis for independent developers to build new features. The cell phone has become a lucrative platform for more than handset makers—also in on the party are makers of digital cameras, music services, and organizer software.
“Not only are existing industries being transformed and sometimes toppled by software platforms, but new industries are also springing up around them; witness the multibillion-dollar ringtone business.”
Yup. Read the article here >>
It’s all about building digital business platforms…
The New Yale MBA: Value and Values?
Hey! Have they been reading Doug Smith?
The new MBA curriculum at Yale takes a major step (on paper at least) in the right direction…
Now will this become a trend or an anomaly?
Von Hippel: Democratizing Innovation
I meant to do this quite some time ago, but it slipped my mind (like most things). So here it is: a free download of Democratizing Innovation by MIT’s Eric Von Hippel.
The table of contents:
1 Introduction and Overview
2 Development of Products by Lead Users
3 Why Many Users Want Custom Products
4 Users’ Innovate-or-Buy Decisions
5 Users’ Low-Cost Innovation Niches
6 Why Users Often Freely Reveal Their Innovations
7 Innovation Communities
8 Adapting Policy to User Innovation
9 Democratizing Innovation
10 Application: Searching for Lead User Innovations
11 Application: Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design
12 Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields
Here’s why I keep going back to this book:
“Firms can make a profitable business from identifying and mass producing user-developed innovations or developing and building new products based on ideas drawn from such innovations. They can gain advantages over competitors by learning to do this better than other manufacturers. They may, for example, learn to identify commercially promising user innovations more effectively that other firms. Firms using lead user search techniques … are beginning to do this systematically rather than accidentally—surely an improvement. Effectively transferring user-developed innovations to mass manufacture is seldom as simple as producing a product based on a design by a single lead user. Often, a manufacturer combines features developed by several independent lead users to create an attractive commercial offering. This is a skill that a company can learn better than others in order to gain a competitive advantage.”
Fact-Free Reality
“Ask yourself what percentage of the ‘input’ — the information on which we must navigate our busy lives in this new world of markets — is fact-based? If the input comes from ‘news’, is the ‘news’ fact based? If the input comes from the Bush White House, is it ‘fact based’? If the input comes from TV programming (even ‘reality shows’), is it fact based? How about from your relgious leaders? What about schools? How about work?”
Doug Smith’s brilliant post is here >>
The CMO’s Challenge: Profiting from Proliferation
How We Eat – an example of the new segmentation the nerds at McKinsey would have you think about. Very interestink!
And here’s how the profits stack up by the segments:
Lots more interesting stuff from their e-book.
Video: “What’s Going On?”
Now is a good time to ask yourself this question…
John Hagel on Mastering New Marketing Practices
Just read it.
JH3 sure makes you think, doesn’t he?
Manasco on “The Wisdom of Communities”
My friend Britton Manasco blogs about the “Wisdom of Communities” here.
His point is “the future is increasingly about the wisdom of crowds — or, at least, communities.”
So people, says Britton, especially in the B2B world, tend to trust their peers and not the experts.
Britton’s right to some extent. But what he forgets is that a community is a group of individuals, some more passionate than others, focused around a practice or interest. The leaders of the community are viewed as experts (perhaps not in the academic sense), but certainly in the role of the teacher helping the novices get up to speed.
These “experts” rise to the top naturally. And unlike senior management in most American companies, they rise to the top by virtue of merit – the knowledge they share with their fellow community members. The wisdom of communities is thus not the wisdom of crowds, but the wisdom of the expert-practitioner. Often they’re amateurs. Which makes them even more believable, because they’re in it for the love of the game, not necessarily for the money like the “professionals.”
Ask yourself: How can we get customers to collaborate with our company/companies to co-create products and services that benefit everyone involved?
To me, that’s the real power of communities, aside from double loop marketing.
The Self-Managing Employee
This innovative approach to team or group management comes to us from Taco Bell.
Yes, that Taco Bell.
Read all about it in HBSWK.
In my opinion, it is white-collar, Harvard-educated management types that won’t be able to adapt to this. Proof point – how many self managed teams are there at IBM Global Services or McKinsey, for that matter?
Boeing, Boeing, Ford!
Why? Why appoint Alan Mulally, head of Boeing’s commercial airfcraft division, as Ford Motor’s new chief executive?
According to outgoing CEO Bill Ford: “Business skills by and large are transferable”…
Wait there’s more:
According to Billy-Boy, there are striking similarities between the car and aircraft industries. Just your everyday issues like:
– long development times
– complex manufacturing processes
– troublesome unions
– thousands of supplier relationships.
Wow.
One more industry similarity they forgot to mention – incompetence in senior management?
Update: BusinessWeek has an interesting angle…
Martin Sorrell Doesn’t Get It
The Internets is not just another new media.
And Sorrell should know better.
I must say I’m stunned by his ignorance. It’s not TV. Not even close. If you want Internet strategy, based on Sorrell’s view, I would not talk to these people:
– Grey Global Group
– Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide
– Young & Rubicam
– JWT
– Hill & Knowlton
– Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide
– Burson-Marsteller
– Cohn & Wolfe
– Mediaedge:cia
– Mindshare
– MediaInsight
– Maximize
Step down Sorrell. No wonder you guys at WPP and Co. don’t have a clue.
Dimitar Vesselinov: The World 2 Come
The World 2 Come is a wonderful blog by Dimitar Vesselinov from Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
Dimitar has a knack for finding really cool stuff on innovation and soccer! For example, see his entry: Marissa Mayer on Innovation at Google and his Event of the Month – you guessed it, the FIFA World Cup!
Go check it out >>
The Culture of Entrepreneurship
Will the boys (and girls) from Bangalore eat their lunch? Is today’s Silicon Valley too complacent?
Math, Science, and Social Mobility
Why do some people climb up the social ladder while others stay put? What personal characteristics account for the fact that some people “get ahead” in life and others fall behind?
Here are three contending theories of social mobility >>
In my opinion, there is still a lot to be said for putting your shoulder to the wheel. In this case, the wheel happens to be math and science.
I know from personal experience that even not-so-bright kids get pretty good at physics and calculus if they get put through an Indian style education.
This is something we don’t understand in the West, because we have lost our capacity for heavy lifting – both as a society and as individuals.
Who needs to think? If the Lord wanted us to learn science, calculus would be included in the Bible, etc.
Unfortunately, America seems to be slacking off big time. Apparently, we’re turning into a nation of massage therapists, according to GE’s Immelt. 🙂
Thoughts?
The Return on Attention
John Hagel is his usual insightful self in his blog post “Paying Attention“…
He asks: what is behind the desire to receive attention?
Is it a weak sense of self? A desire to be recognized and liked? An unhealthy need to be seen? Envied?
Let’s go back to before Goldhaber, to someone like St. Augustine, perhaps.
Immelt on Leadership
Emory’s Kelly Bean tells us about Jeffrey Immelt’s 5 traits of GE’s growth leaders:
1. External focus
2. Imagination and creativity
3. Clear thinking and decisiveness
4. Inclusiveness
5. Deep domain expertise
It’s all about creating leaders for tomorrow, not today.
Seems like Immelt is not quite optimistic about the US these days. Here’s what he told Fareed Zakaria
“More people will graduate in the United States in 2006 with sports-exercise degrees than electrical-engineering degrees… So, if we want to be the massage capital of the world, we’re well on our way.”
Ouch. Please read Zakaria’s How Long Will America Lead the World?.
Here’s a quick byte:
There are some who see the decline of science and technology as part of a larger cultural decay. A country that once adhered to a Puritan ethic of delayed gratification has become one that revels in instant pleasures. We’re losing interest in the basics—math, manufacturing, hard work, savings—and becoming a postindustrial society that specializes in consumption and leisure.
Ignoring the Death of our Planet
These are sad days. The president, the business community, and the religious establishment have all turn their backs on Life on Earth.
Now Al Gore wants to save the world, with a powerpoint slideshow (and a movie).
At least he’s doing something.
The oil lobby has already come out with anti-Gore attack ads defending Carbon Dioxide (and their profits). Yay!
America, when did we lose the ability to think? At what point did we decide that the future doesn’t matter any more?
What Would Jesus Do to Save the Planet? Play bingo? Drive an SUV? Hint: He kicked the money lenders out of the temple…
Creation Nets: A Global View from JH3+JSB
On his blog, John Hagel III talks about the emergence and growth of creation nets.
Question: What is a creation net?
Answer: forms of open innovation that involve sustained relationships across large numbers of participants collaborating together to create new knowledge across traditional institutional boundaries.
Read the working paper – Creation Nets: Harnessing the Potential of Open Innovation>>
The Meaning-Driven Business
Does your business have meaning? A purpose beyond the purpose of making money?
See Guy Kawasaki’s “Art of the Start” clip below (hat-tip to Dominic Basulto from businessinnovationinsider.com)
Funny thing – we must find a way to do what we love, or we are wasting our lives:
Dr. K. Anders Ericsson’s research on performance suggests that when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t “good” at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better…
– from the NYTimes article by the Freakonomics nerds – read the article at soccer blog >>
Blogger Becomes CEO at Sun
Jonathan Schwartz gets his day in the Sun!
Scott McNealy’s still around, but Schwartz now gets a chance to lead.
“Scott has a short haircut,” says Schwartz. “And unless he pulls something out that mandates it as a part of my employment contract, I’m keeping my haircut.”
Here, on his blog, Schwartz meets Brazil’s Lula to discuss the World Cup which starts in 45 days, 14 hours and 56 minutes. Any tips for Bruce Arena, Jonathan? Be sure to send them on to our soccer blog!
I wonder what the first post as CEO will be? Let’s hope he doesn’t stop blogging… my guess is he’ll be the CEO to change the landscape of corporate communications – using his blog!
Womenomics: The Business Value of Women
Question: What would happen to the world if the CEOs of ExxonMobil, the NY Times, Wal-Mart, GE and Microsoft were all women?
The Economist tells us that women are now the most powerful engine of global growth. Apparently over the past decade, the increased employment of women in developed economies has contributed much more to global growth than China has.
Listen to this:
Making better use of women’s skills is not just a matter of fairness. Plenty of studies suggest that it is good for business, too. Women account for only 7% of directors on the world’s corporate boards—15% in America, but less than 1% in Japan. Yet a study by Catalyst, a consultancy, found that American companies with more women in senior management jobs earned a higher return on equity than those with fewer women at the top. This might be because mixed teams of men and women are better than single-sex groups at solving problems and spotting external threats. Studies have also suggested that women are often better than men at building teams and communicating.
To make men feel even worse, researchers have also concluded that women make better investors than they do. A survey by Digital Look, a British financial website, found that women consistently earn higher returns than men. A survey of American investors by Merrill Lynch examined why women were better at investing. Women were less likely to “churn” their investments; and men tended to commit too much money to single, risky ideas. Overconfidence and overtrading are a recipe for poor investment returns.
Is anybody listening?
I posted about this a while back: Advice to Women who would be CEOs: “Stay away from HR”
I usually think of “business-women” in two camps – the toady – a conservative woman who moved up the ranks by reinforcing the stereotypes (eg. Kay Bailey Hutchison) or – the trailblazer – a talented woman who created her own way despite the barriers and obstacles thrown in her way by the good-old boys (eg. Anita Roddick).
Of course some people in certain parts of the world still think of women as property. Is it a coincidence that our problems with terrorism stem from these same places?
The World’s Most Innovative Companies
The Boston Consulting Group and BusinessWeek tell us that these are the 100 most innovative companies in the world:
Rank Company
1 Apple
2 Google
3 3M
4 Toyota
5 Microsoft
6 General Electric
7 Procter & Gamble
8 Nokia
9 Starbucks
10 IBM
11 Virgin
12 Samsung
13 Sony
14 Dell
15 IDEO
16 BMW
17 Intel
18 eBay
19 IKEA
20 Wal-Mart
21 Amazon
22 Target
23 Honda
24 Research In Motion
25 Southwest
26 Porsche
27 Genentech
28 Cisco
29 Nike
30 Motorola
31 DaimlerChrysler
32 Infosys
33 Ryanair
34 Pixar
35 SonyEricsson
36 Whole Foods
37 Capital One
38 Tesco
39 Danone
40 BP
41 PepsiCo
42 Hewlett Packard
43 Disney
44 jetBlue
45 W.L. Gore & Associates
46 Skype Technologies
47 FedEx
48 Bang & Olufsen
49 Renault
50 L’Oreal
51 ExxonMobil
52 Siemens
53 Johnson & Johnson
54 Shell
55 Pfizer
56 Singapore Airlines
57 Nissan
58 DuPont
59 Zara
60 TiVo
61 Yahoo!
62 Macquarie Bank
63 Audi
64 Harley Davidson
65 Progressive Insurance
66 Volvo
67 Philips Electronics
68 ING Bank
69 Nestle
70 Boeing
71 Matsushita Electric Industrial
72 easyJet
73 UPS
74 Coca-Cola
75 Cirque du Soleil (tied)
75 McKinsey (tied)
75 Woolworths (tied)
78 Hutchison Telecommunications
79 Salesforce.com
80 ACS
81 ITC
82 Time Warner
83 Danaher
84 Costco Wholesale
85 LG Electronics
86 bankinter
87 Amgen
88 Caterpillar
89 Accenture
90 SAP
91 SK Telecom
92 Home Depot
93 LVMH
94 Gap
95 Unilever
96 Goldman Sachs
97 John Deere & Co.
98 Whirlpool
99 Entel
100 McDonald’s
To me this makes no sense. This is in fact a list of the world’s most innovative dinosaurs. Massive companies which are still able to create value using new ideas. But these companies (w/ the exception of IDEO and a few others) are NOT at the forefront of innovation. Rather, that honor belongs to small companies, often at the periphery, which introduce the dinosaurs to these innovations.
Furthermore, innovation is relative, and needs to be measured in the industry or marketspace of the company. IDEO is more innovative than McDonald’s in absolute terms, but what really matters is how innovative McDonald’s is against its competitors.
What I enjoyed was the cover story:
Today, innovation is about much more than new products. It is about reinventing business processes and building entirely new markets that meet untapped customer needs. Most important, as the Internet and globalization widen the pool of new ideas, it’s about selecting and executing the right ideas and bringing them to market in record time.
In the 1990s, innovation was about technology and control of quality and cost. Today, it’s about taking corporate organizations built for efficiency and rewiring them for creativity and growth. “There are a lot of different things that fall under the rubric of innovation,” says Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business and author of Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution. “Innovation does not have to have anything to do with technology.”
Here’s an article from Tom Davenport on the types of innovation. I think it helps make the point that product innovation is just one type of innovation.
Another great insight comes to us from John Hagel, who talks about the limits of western thinking in his critique of Gary Hamel‘s latest thinking. Hagel tells us to focus on understanding the continuous management innovations across enterprises that are emerging in Asia.
Question: How does one link innovation to brand? to shareholder value? to sustainability? Branding, design, eco-imagination. They’re all linked…
The Community Trap: Joga.com vs. SoccerBlog.com
At first glance I have no chance.
How can my puny soccerblog.com site take on the likes of Joga.com from Nike + Google?
Answer: It doesn’t have to.
Joga.com from Nike + Google is too commercial, period. So it’s no contest.
Communities have to be open – in spirit and intent. They cannot exclude players, teams, or participants. I’m sure Nike + Google will learn. Until then, I’m having fun!
John Hagel: Joga.com and the Return of Community
William Dunk’s Global Province: Agile Companies #281
Microsoft: A Dinosaur?
The Economist:
The pressure Microsoft is facing in its core businesses is similar to one confronted by IBM—another firm that was once synonymous with computing. At the beginning of the 1990s IBM had to face up to the shift from a computing world dominated by mainframes to one dotted by personal computers. In this new world hardware became a low-margin commodity and Microsoft’s operating system took the privileged position. Today, Microsoft still dominates the PC market. But like IBM before it, today’s giant knows that its position is under threat.
and
So Microsoft now plans to graft subscriptions, downloadable add-ons and advertisements on to its core products. Again, it portrays this as an opportunity to open up new revenue streams, rather than a defensive tactic. “There are three ways to pay for anything in this business: ads, transactions and subscriptions,” says Craig Mundie, one of Microsoft’s chief technology officers. “You’ll see the company offer a full range of different ways to buy our product.” The difficulty will be getting the timing right, so that new products do not undermine existing cash cows.
For now, however, too many Microsoft managers are still measured by their success with yesterday’s business model—selling boxes of software. Microsoft is still formulating its response to the rise of online software. As one former Microsoft executive explains: the company’s problems are not just technical but organisational. “It has a vision but not a roadmap; it can see the peaks but doesn’t know how to cross the foothills to get there.”
C’mon Gates! Show us what MS can do – get funky! You guys are too big, too top-driven, too reactive… Unleash your employees! Start leading! Let’s see some disruptive innovation from within…
Read the article>>
Rules for Innovators?
From the Talentism blog, a great list for wanna-be innovators:
(1) Innovation starts with “And”
(2) Not Just Smart, But Always Focused
(3) Make Sure You Have the “No But” Critic in the Room
(4) Build Crappy Prototypes Fast
(5) Don’t Listen To Customers, Watch Them
(6) If It’s Right, Change It
(7) Sell it Like you Play It
(8) Iterate ‘Till You Drop
(9) Appoint One Person Bad Cop and Follow Their Command
(10) Innovation Is About Learning, not Genius
Here’s one more:
(11) Constancy of Purpose!
Ram Charan: Got Business Acumen?
What is business acumen?
In the latest S+B, Ram Charan writes:
“the art of business acumen: linking an insightful assessment of the external business landscape with the keen awareness of how money can be made — and then executing the strategy to deliver the desired results.”
and:
“…the ability to position their companies advantageously while operating within the same external landscape as their competitors.”
So how does one go about getting these insights into the external business landcape?
Charan suggests you ask yourself a series of six questions, and explore the ideas with colleagues and peers:
1. What is happening in the world today?
2. What does it mean for others?
3. What does it mean for us?
4. What would have to happen first (for the results we want to occur)?
5. What do we have to do to play a role?
6. What do we do next?
Hmmmm.
Read the article >>
Doug Smith on Brand Delivery
Writes Doug Smith on his blog:
“…brand is the upshot of three related human actions: promising, delivering and experiencing. Employees (a category that includes executives) promise and deliver. Customers (and investors who are not actively involved in companies) experience. Most of us have yet to catch up with the latter two of these activities: delivery and experience. Because we are bombarded with logos and symbols and promises, we tend too rarely to look beyond the promising to the delivery and experience.
“That is, until the experience is entirely out of line with the promise.”
Read the post to get what “brand delivery” really means. Smith also gives us an example – FOX vs. WaPo – guess which one has a consistent brand delivery…
Vinod Khosla’s Eco-imagination
From my other favorite, the Economist:
A lesson he [Vinod Khosla] learned from India, he says, is that one has to think big: “Unless you influence the lives of at least a million people, it simply doesn’t matter.”
And:
“Mr Khosla is particularly enthused by “cellulosic” ethanol, a highly efficient way of making fuel from agricultural waste. President Bush touted this new technology in his recent state-of-the-union speech, suggesting that it may come to market in six years. In typically impatient form, Mr Khosla wants to halve that gestation period. Anyone who spends time with him is liable to be hit with his well-researched but mind-numbing PowerPoint presentation on ethanol—unveiled with the affection that some men reserve for pictures of their grandchildren.”
But this is not a joke, guys. It’s the next wave of capitalism- natural capitalism, as some call it.
Wake up Amrica. It is time.
Again:
“It is easy to dismiss this enthusiasm as the irrelevant obsession of a rich hobbyist or the harmless utopianism of a capitalist who has made his pile. But the big oil companies are certainly not taking Mr Khosla lightly. The oil industry is funding a lavish counter-campaign to his ballot initiative called “Californians Against Higher Taxes”. Perhaps the best reason to take Mr Khosla seriously is that his professional success and Republican leanings mean that he has the ears of powerful people. He has been making the rounds, from the White House and Capitol Hill to the World Economic Forum at Davos and the TED conference (a big annual gathering for top venture capitalists), banging the drum for ethanol. Before Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, attended a recent TED conference in Monterey, California, he was sceptical about ethanol. After hearing Mr Khosla, he decided to help fund the cause. “When have you ever seen greens, farmers and guys like me and Larry on the same page?” demands Mr Khosla.”
Read the article >>
The BBC as a Global Online Brand
“The BBC is both an entrepreneurial anomaly and an illustration of the importance of branding on the internet. It has received considerable financial backing – from a government- mandated licence fee rather than venture capitalists. But its growth stems mostly from the reputation the BBC has earned through its old-media activities in radio and television.” writes the FT.
Darn right. The BBC has done what Rupert Murdoch could not (and would not) – it has become the online brand for trusted news, blowing away the pathetic efforts of the CBS, ABC, NBC, and FOX.
Why? Because the BBC is truly more fair and balanced. And it has something no American network has- constancy of purpose.
Read the article >>
PS- The other global British success story is the good old Economist.
The Top 30 CEOs: Where’s H. Lee Scott?
From Barron’s via Business Innovation Insider:
Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway
Kenneth Chenault, American Express
George David, United Technologies
Lew Frankfort, Coach
Richard Fuld, Lehman Brothers
Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric
Steven Jobs, Apple Computer
Richard Kovacevich, Wells Fargo
A.G. Lafley, Procter & Gamble
Arthur Levinson, Genentech
John Mackey, Whole Foods
Raymond Mason, Legg Mason
Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide Financial
Anne Mulcahy, Xerox
Steven Reinemund, Pepsico
Glenn Renwick, Progressive
Steven Roth, Vornado Realty
Bob Simpson, XTO Energy
James Sinegal, Costco Wholesale
Robert Toll, Toll Brothers
My question: Where’s H. Lee Scott?
The Idea Ecosystem
How’s this for an idea –
“An internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or make an efficiency improvement. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the sentiments of the company’s engineers, computer scientists and project managers – as well as its marketers, accountants and even the receptionist.”
Idea marketplaces are happening now at Rite-Solutions and InnoCentive, according to Here’s an idea: Let everyone have ideas, an article in the IHT:
The next frontier is to tap the quiet genius that exists outside organizations – to attract innovations from people who are prepared to work with a company, even if they don’t work for it. An intriguing case in point is InnoCentive, a virtual research and development lab through which major corporations invite scientists and engineers worldwide to contribute ideas and solve problems they haven’t been able to crack themselves.
InnoCentive, based in Andover, Mass., is literally a marketplace of ideas. It has signed up more than 30 blue-chip companies, including Procter & Gamble, Boeing and DuPont, whose research labs are groaning under the weight of unsolved problems and unfinished projects. It has also signed up more than 90,000 biologists, chemists and other professionals from more than 175 countries. These “solvers” compete to meet thorny technical challenges posted by “seeker” companies. Each challenge has a detailed scientific description, a deadline and an award, which can run as high as $100,000.
“We are talking about the democratization of science,” said Alpheus Bingham, who spent 28 years as a scientist and senior research executive at Eli Lilly & Company before becoming the president and chief executive of InnoCentive. “What happens when you open your company to thousands and thousands of minds, each of them with a totally different set of life experiences?”
InnoCentive, founded as an independent start-up by Lilly in 2001, has an impressive record. It can point to a long list of valuable scientific ideas that have arrived, with surprising speed, from faraway places. In addition to the United States, the top countries for solvers are China, India and Russia.
It’s all about your company’s innovation ecosystem. Do you have one? How do you build one? How do you participate in the ecosystem which exists already?
How to make China even richer
That’s the Economist for you- always prodding us to think a step ahead.
What would really happen in China if the “peasants owned their own land”?
Branding in Asia: Interview with Martin Roll
I recently interviewed Martin Roll, the founder and CEO of VentureRepublic, a leading strategic advisory firm out of Singapore. Roll is the author of the ground-breaking bestseller Asian Brand Strategy: How Asia Builds Strong Brands.
Here are his 10 steps to building an Asian brand:
1. The CEO needs to lead the brand strategy work
2. Build your own model, as not every model suits all
3. Involve your stakeholders including the customers
4. Advance the corporate vision
5. Exploit new technology
6. Empower people to become brand ambassadors
7. Create the right delivery system
8. Communicate!
9. Measure the brand performance
10. Adjust relentlessly and be ready to raise your own bar all the times
For details, read the interview at the Zyman Institute of Brand Science website >>
Jonathan Schwartz on Open Source
“…fighting against things like open source is, in a way, fighting gravity.”
in this article on Always-On >>
$3.8 Billion? – March Madness and Lost Productivity
From a press release by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.:
The decision by CBS Sports to offer free online viewing of men’s college basketball games during the annual NCAA championship tournament (better known as March Madness) is great news for hoops fans but it could be disastrous for the nation’s employers, who will undoubtedly see a significant drop-off in worker productivity.
The cost of this productivity drain could prove to be substantial over the three weeks of the tournament. In fact, for every 13.5 minutes workers spend on the Internet watching March Madness games, which begin on March 16, the cost to employers in lost wages alone exceeds $237 million. Over the 16 days of the tournament that could reach as high as $3.8 billion, according to an estimate released Tuesday by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.
Now they should do an analysis on worldwide lost productivity caused by this summer’s World Cup (that’s soccer)!
BTW, the March-Madness-online link is here. Just click on the “Continue on to CSTV.com” button…
Bratz vs. Barbie: The Power of Strategic Innovation
In her book – The Power of the Purse: How Smart Businesses Are Adapting to the World’s Most Important Consumers – Women, Fara Warner describes how the MGA’s Bratz line of brash, but fashionable, dolls toppled Mattel’s Barbie — by focusing on consumer behavior.
Says Warner:
– Don’t allow personal history or preconceived ideas of women — in this case, young girls — to overshadow insight from consumers.
– Read, listen, and respond to correspondence from consumers — not their parents. MGA used this strategy to create a line of boy Bratz.
– Consider the consumers’ whole world, not just the time when they are using the product. This strategy was used to expand Bratz beyond dolls and clothes.
– Move with consumer trends, not industry timelines. MGA creates new clothing lines for its dolls every three to six months, not just once a year.
Read this chapter — Toppling Barbie: Bratz Predict the Future — from her book.
The Bratz example serves as a powerful reminder that companies like Mattel cannot afford to rest on their laurels, but need to selectively forget the past, as Vijay Govindarajan would say.
Fara has also started a blog. Her introductory post is here.
Maybe there’s a place for an environmental girl doll one of these days — perhaps a Jane Goodall do-good activist doll? I mean why do toy companies focus on girls, malls and fashion? All right, I know the answer… it was a rhetorical question.
The Time is Now for “Narrowcasting”
According to the NYTimes:
“In the last six months, major media companies have received much attention for starting to move their own programming online, whether downloads for video iPods or streaming programs that can be watched over high-speed Internet connections.
“Perhaps more interesting — and, arguably, more important — are the thousands of producers whose programming would never make it into prime time but who have very dedicated small audiences. It’s a phenomenon that could be called slivercasting.”
The web has always been a narrowcasting medium.
More from the article:
Discovery Communications, which has been a master of the current system, creating 15 different cable channels including Animal Planet and Discovery Health, is now exploring even more specialized services over the Internet. One will be introduced tomorrow for $9.95 a month. It will offer 30,000 video clips excerpted from its library of documentaries and other educational programs to help grade school and high school students with their homework. In the future, other services will offer content focused on narrow topics in travel, science and health.
Discovery, Mr. Hendricks says, is in a good position to create such services because of its large archive. “We have a wealth of programming just related to cancer, just related to Alaska and so on,” he said.
In addition to offering Internet distribution, Discovery will start to broadcast some of these programs late at night on its regular channels and encourage people to record them, he said.
To be sure, there are doubters. “I’ve never been a believer that we should create channels for all these niches like beach volleyball,” said John Skipper, a senior vice president of ESPN, a unit of the Walt Disney Company. “They just don’t pencil out. Because if you have 12,000 people, you can’t afford to do it. And if you can’t afford to do it, you can’t make any money on it.”
One reason that ESPN has shied away from this sort of niche programming, he said, is that its brand stands for a level of high-quality visual production that would be difficult for small channels to afford. Indeed, ESPN has been investing millions of dollars to produce programs in high-definition formats.
But reticence by some big media companies is making room for independent programmers to explore all sorts of niches.
Hmmm. ESPN doesn’t get it… perhaps Steve Jobs will wake them up.
Here’s the article in full>>