Collaboration 2.0: A new paradigm for sustainability
On the Harvard Business site, global outsourcing executive Vineet Nayar says that smart companies everywhere are recognizing the need to reinvent and realign their relationships with stakeholders along democratic lines, creating in the process a new ethic of shared vision, risk, and reward that will render obsolete traditional attitudes about competition. Nayar labels this new paradigm “collaboration 2.0.”
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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 September 28, 2009:
Four rules for constructive competition
Observing the current political scramble to avoid real innovation in health care, Havas Media Lab’s Umair Haque offers four rules he thinks will increasingly define the competitive environment of the 21st century. These include: Innovation over protectionism; “thick value” over “thin value”; awesome products and services over clever business models; and ethics over expedience as the foundation for strategy. Haque writes in his Edge Economy blog on the Harvard Business site.
Introducing “web squared”
On the Forbes site, web 2.0 promoter Tim O’Reilly reaches into the future and names it “web squared”: a just-dawning era in which the building blocks of web 2.0--open platforms and social networks--are married to new technologies that provide a sense of place and belonging to users currently overwhelmed by the Internet’s undifferentiated abundance. Among these new advancements: GPS, which turns every smart phone into a place-based directory of friends and potential experiences; and the “smart grid,” which makes it possible to update one’s current and emerging interests in real time. The combination of these advancements, plus others, will geometrically increase the importance of digital technology in our daily pursuit of a fulfilling life.
Inside P&G’s new values-based strategy
On the Harvard Business site, professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter tears the wrapper off a new strategy that consumer giant Procter & Gamble has introduced to jump-start global growth. Taking a cue from the socially responsible business movement, P&G has adopted a “purpose-inspired growth strategy” with the goal of “touching and improving more consumers’ lives in more parts of the world... more completely.” As company insiders see it, the new strategy is not a departure from previous practice but an advancement of it, reflecting P&G’s 171-year effort to deliver superior customer value. What has changed? The company’s definition of “value.”
Change your mind, and the rest will follow
On Seth Godin’s blog, the marketing guru describes what comes first. Is it great execution, as so many business authorities have declaimed? No. It’s proper attitude, without which tactics and execution mean nothing. After attitude come approach, goals, and strategy. Then tactics and execution. Get the order of values right; you can make a lot of mistakes along the way and still come out smelling sweet. Start from the bottom of the hierarchy, and sooner or later your work will stink.
Emerging markets will surge post-crisis
Emerging markets will emerge from the global economic crisis in a position to put huge growth numbers on the board, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute. While developed economies will still be recovering from the drop in global equities to almost 50 percent of their 2008 value, and the reduction in cross-border capital flows by almost 80 percent during the same period, emerging economies will have largely avoided the root causes of these problems, and as a result will be well positioned to gain share as markets rebound.
What both sides are missing in the pay wall debate
On MediaShift Idea Lab, Knight News Challenge winner Martin Moore pokes holes in the ideological barriers erected by both sides in the increasingly divisive “pay wall” debate. On one side, corporate media executives want to turn back the clock to a time when media profitability was driven by scarcity and control; on the other side, technologists, media activists, bloggers, and others seek to position information abundance as an emergent human right. Entrenched in their positions, neither side seems capable of recognizing the opportunities that exist to add value to both the customer experience and the public good by extending the findability and usefulness of content through enhanced metadata, mashups, and other readily deployable techniques.
More proof that the Long Tail exists... only in Chris Anderson’s mind
Knowledge@Wharton gives yet another drubbing to Wired editor Chris Anderson’s much trumpeted, but still completely unproven, Long Tail theory. For a $1 million prize offered by online movie distributor Netflix, Wharton researchers analyzed whether or not Netflix sales data--which Anderson used to justify the theory in his 2004 book--could actually support the claim that the virtually unlimited choice made possible via digital commerce would lead consumers to select niche products in greater numbers than they do in the offline world. Not true for Netflix, said the Wharton wonks. Instead, the Pareto Principle--aka, the 80/20 rule--applied with a vengeance to the Netflix data. The problem with Anderson’s theory, said the researchers, is that products get into the Long Tail for good reasons... nobody’s ever heard of them, and nobody cares. Recommendation engines can only reflect tastes, not fundamentally change them.
