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.
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