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< richmedium > | social innovation in the global marketplace explores the business, cultural, and technological forces that are reshaping the process of creating value in global markets, and giving rise to a new strategic framework for designing and scaling for-profit and nonprofit enterprises.

media file 7.6.09 | Rethinking global innovation

Rethinking global innovation

On the Harvard Business site, innovation specialist Scott Anthony argues that success in emerging markets doesn’t depend on coming up with dumbed-down versions of products and services that have made it in more developed markets. Instead, the challenge is to come up with complete products that fit the wallets of individuals in these new, exciting market spaces. “Companies need to create satisfying meals that customers in emerging markets consider delectable.” Case in point: India’s Tata Group, which has fundamentally reinvented the concept of the budget automobile.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for July 6, 2009:

Want to be an innovator? Think outside your (cultural) box

According to this study produced by Singapore Management University, the road to breakthrough innovation lies in experiencing truly foreign ideas--stuff you just won’t run across at the Starbucks on Page Mill Road. At its root, creativity derives from the collision of seemingly irrelevant concepts with one’s accepted world view. Creativity flourishes in the presence of foreign, and even outlandish ideas. The more one experiences such encounters, the better one is able to integrate them into an entirely novel and productive world view. And from that new world view, innovation follows.

Want to get creative? Get lost

People who live abroad are more creative; and the more time they spend away from home, the more creative they become. That’s according to a study published on Knowledge@INSEAD. Tourism doesn’t count; personal transformation is an immersive process, spurred in particular by adaptation to foreign languages and cultures.

“Living brands” for real life

On Creativity Online, Pearlfisher creative director Sophie Maxwell discusses the emergence of “living brands” as a major corrective to the concept of “lifestyle branding,” which promotes a consumer aesthetic built around the idealized lifestyle of a celebrity designer or personality, such as Ralph Lauren or Martha Stewart. Living brands tap into the growing, global consumer impulse to integrate influences drawn from personal life experience into an aesthetic that reflects one’s individual values and priorities, versus a carefully cultivated image that exists only on the advertising page.

Think global, go local

Advertising Age reports on an emerging vision for the global advertising agency: Open one office in every major time zone, and service clients everywhere from there. This represents a major shift from the empire-building game plan of firms like Havas, which have been gobbling up small shops around the globe in an effort to build an always-on network. The thought leaders in this movement are tossing a few surprises into the mix, including picking out-of-the-way spots to set up shop. Think Belarus vs. Beijing.

ESPN bets that sports fanatics will pay for it

BusinessWeek reports on a bold gamble by sports powerhouse ESPN to bring all its online assets under the ESPN Insider paid site umbrella. Starting in June 2009, users will have to cough up $7 per month or $40 per year to access ESPN’s brand of extreme sports-fanatic content. Under its former, less restrictive rules, ESPN Insider already racked up 350,000 paying customers, say company representatives.

ASCAP to cell phone users: Pay me

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that ASCAP, the music performance rights organization, has filed a brief in a lawsuit against AT&T arguing that consumers who play musical ringtones in public are violating the copyrights covering the songs on which the ringtones are based. According the brief, playing the ringtone in public constitutes a “public performance” of the work--a theory the EFF derides as legal nonsense. The post includes a link to the filed brief.

Life is brutish, nasty, and short (and it’s okay to admit it)

On the Harvard Business site, scholar Ruth McGrath explores the seemingly fruitless exercise of creating “sustainable competitive advantage.” The problem is that there is actually no such thing; In the current digital environment, sustainability is a mirage. Contemporary competition is a game of letting go and moving on... getting out of declining businesses and refocusing the organization on new opportunities as they emerge.

media file 7.1.09 | Twitter’s rules for radical innovation

Twitter’s rules for radical innovation

On the Harvard Business site, Havas Media Lab’s Umair Haque describes ten operating principles that make digital phenom Twitter one of the most radical management innovators of 21st century so far. Among these rules: Ideals beat strategies; open beats closed; connection beats transaction; public beats private; and good beats evil.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for July 1, 2009:

Nine tips for jumpstarting innovation

When companies go on the hunt for innovations to drive growth, they often waste time scouring the last place they are likely to find it: their own back yards. Rather than try to dredge up new ideas from the heart of the enterprise, look to its periphery, say researchers John Bessant, Kathrin Moslein, and Bettina von Stamm in this Wall Street Journal report. Among the techniques that organizations can use to spot the future before it emerges: Scenario building; open innovation; tapping expert users; “deep dive” consumer research; creating online learning communities; and more.

Innovation: It takes a village

For organizations struggling to survive, let alone advance, Knowledge@Wharton has some advice: Build an “innovation network.” By tapping the expertise and resources of outside R&D partners, Proctor & Gamble improved its innovation productivity by 60 percent, resulting in over $10 billion in revenues from 400 collaboratively developed new products. Performance like this requires organizations to build new internal capacity to cultivate and manage productive external relationships, while simultaneously strengthening their internal R&D capacity to evaluate and incorporate potentially promising innovations.

AOL: The future of digital content?!!!

You heard it here first: AOL represents the future of successful, sustainable digital content publishing, says Silicon Alley Insider. AOL’s coming divorce from Time Warner will free it to do what it does best: Build flashy, inexpensive content sites around special-interest topics, then plug them into AOL’s online traffic fire hose. It’s a model that represents the digital version of yesterday’s magazine launch--only much cheaper, easier to tweak, and less troubling to kill if things don’t quickly work out. AOL has more than 300 staff members producing such sites and contracts with about the same number of freelancers. In the past six months, the company has hired more than 50 journalists from places such as the Associated Press, Washington Post, and USA Today.

Sorry, there’s no way to save the TV business

On Advertising Age, Internet analyst Henry Blodget explains the coming demise of the TV business--broadcast, network, cable, and satellite--with brutal simplicity. TV execs are reliving the same delusion that newspaper execs held onto through most of the last decade, when revenues were holding up despite dire predictions to the contrary. And the same phenomenon that ultimately doomed the newspaper business is about to visit the TV business: the complete breakdown of every distribution barrier protecting historical margins and profits, and a surge in abundant, accessible, free TV across the global Internet.

It ain’t free--it’s a steal

Trendspotter Malcolm Gladwell takes Wired’s Chris Anderson to task in this New Yorker review of the latter’s book, Free. While Anderson asserts that digital technology inexorably drives all products “made of ideas” to a zero price point, Gladwell comes to a different conclusion: “Information wants to be free” is a useful meme for content distribution powerhouses like Google and Amazon, but it is neither an inevitable outcome nor one supported by trends in industries other than media that are being transformed by digital technology. Case in point: the drug industry, which is using digital technology to produce ever-more specific compounds for increasingly targeted markets, at ever higher price points. Meanwhile, YouTube--the avatar of Free--spends over $260 million annually to license commercial content, essentially to make a market that otherwise does not exist with its free, user-generated fare. In other words, the problem with Free is that consumers know exactly how to value it.

Why media brands stumble globally

Advertising Age explores the reasons why globalization has not yet swept the media market to the same degree as in other digital industries--computers or cell phones, for example. While consumer product firms have a natural disposition toward building consistent brand identities over time while simultaneously tweaking products and pitches to specific markets, media companies either give too little attention to branding (relying instead on a hits-driven marketing strategy) or bring a bias or agenda that doesn’t travel well across borders. To be successful globally, media brands need to develop a broad, international appeal that comes from focusing on shared human and social values; and combine that appeal with content fine-tuned to specific audiences. Among those doing it well: Bloomberg, CNN, People, Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Economist.

It’s time for a “slow marketing” movement

Think “slow food”: ingredients grown organically and prepared with old-fashioned love, attention, and technique, resulting in undeniably superior appeal, taste, and value. Now think “slow marketing”: brand building that puts the customer first, strives for credibility, and sustains long-term relationships. It’s not a throwback to a time gone by; it’s an approach demanded for success in the digital markets of the future. So writes Nielsen’s Peter Blackshaw in this column for Advertising Age.