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media file 11.16.09 | Why all great digital firms will build or buy an ad network

Why all great digital firms will build or buy an ad network

On the Advertising Age site, ad network exec Todd Sacerdoti confidently forecasts the future for his profession. Just as all major digital firms have either built or bought some form of email, communications, or social networking technology to unify their customer base, so too will they build or buy an ad network to unify the commercial marketplace for these customers.

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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 November 16,2009:

Why “lean” is the future of innovation

Can innovation initiatives succeed in business environments that stress efficiency and effectiveness? Sure, write the editors of Knowledge@Wharton, because lean processes force innovators to size up opportunities quickly, and move on if there’s no clear path to success. Companies typically waste a lot of time and money on product development because standards and processes for accelerating the best ideas and killing marginal ones are often implicit or nonexistent. Lean innovation works because it subjects new ideas to feasibility and marketplace tests much earlier in the development cycle than is typical for more white-coat development efforts, with the result that the greenlighted innovation already has an existing following among staff and customers.

Why innovation efforts usually fail

On the Forbes site, growth strategist Peter Hartung explains why corporate innovation initiatives have such a dismal success rate. Easy, Hartung says: Innovation is an inherently inefficient, messy, and disruptive process; whereas most corporate innovation efforts strive for the efficient and effective use of capital to leverage and preserve existing revenue streams. Such wishful thinking leads to a predictable result: Not only does the innovation effort fail, but at the end of the process the organization often finds itself on a downward spiral, with no new growth opportunities in sight to offset declines in its core business.

Why innovation is the engine of green business

Innosight’s Strategy & Innovation site documents a discussion between Innosight partner Mark Johnson and sustainability consultants Andrew Shapiro and Lewis Perkins on how innovation is jump-starting and sustaining the green economy.

Will “augmented reality” change how we know our world?

On the Harvard Business site, management consultant John Sviokla argues that while “augmented reality”--the novel technique of layering digital content on top of ordinary reality--holds the potential to spark the next revolution in business creativity, further accelerating the digital transformation of traditional industries such as media, advertising, health care, and consumer services--it also has the power to ultimately reframe our relationship with such basic concepts as information, knowledge, learning, and memory.

media file 9.28.09 | Collaboration 2.0: A new paradigm for sustainability

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.

media file 7.21.09 | Advice to the book industry: Take it up the Amazon

Advice to the book industry: Take it up the Amazon

On the Slate site, media gadfly Jack Shafer questions the seeming reluctance of the book industry to go along with Amazon’s $9.99 price point for books sold on its Kindle e-book platform. The argument resembles nothing so much as the music industry’s fight against electronic distribution of music tracks--a struggle that started in 1999, when Napster launched, and effectively ended in 2003, when Apple’s iTunes introduced a commercially viable platform for selling individual music tracks at $0.99 apiece. In the four years between those two events, a robust, underground, pirate music distribution system developed that has made across-the-board monetization of music content all but impossible. Will book publishers learn from the missteps of the music industry--or will they just repeat them?

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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 21, 2009:

Publishers fret over e-book strategy

The New York Times reports on the collective hand-wringing in book publishing circles over whether and when to release their blockbuster titles in e-book form. Driving this question: Amazon.com has effectively set the e-book price ceiling at $9.99, versus $25 to $35 for a hardcover title. In reality, even at $9.99 e-books perform better financially for publishers than a hardcover book sold through a retail outlet, where publishers can expect to earn less than $1 on a book after point-of-sale discounts and manufacturing, distribution, and royalty costs. Nevertheless, publishers worry that the Internet will exert downward price pressure that will turn the whole enterprise into a painful route--particularly if Amazon succeeds in dominating distribution and thus gets to call the shots on pricing and margins.

“Chaos Scenario” in full swing

Almost five years ago, in early 2005, advertising guru Bob Garfield predicted the “Chaos Scenario”: a future in which brand advertising as we’ve traditionally known it is displaced by new, digital forms of customer engagement. Now, according to a Forrester report described on Internetnews.com, the Chaos Scenario has landed. According to the report, in the next five years, digitally based customer engagement spending will grow to over 20 percent of overall marketing expenditures--with almost all of that growth coming out of the hide of traditional brand advertising. Gone are the days when interactive marketing represents the experimental portion of the marketing budget, the report says. While brand advertising tanks, marketing budgets will shift toward IT infrastructure, customer service, and other forms of direct customer engagement.

Garfield’s”’Chaos Scenario” is now a book. Is that a good thing?

Advertising Age reviews media luminary Bob Garfield’s latest attack on the hand that feeds him: advertising. Garfield has published a new book, entitled “Chaos Scenario,” that forecasts the demise of the ancient art of persuasion, meanwhile using every lever that the new media affords to escape this fate for his new creation. For this, his third book, Garfield is skipping traditional book promotion channels in order to partner with an impressive network of next-generation social media marketing and distribution firms.

Google Wave is the new news

On the BuzzMachine blog, media pundit Jeff Jarvis argues that Google Wave represents more than just the next generation of email communications. It is nothing less than the future of news. Merging collaborative, live reporting and discussions with wikis and other kinds of content repositories, “waves” (versus “articles”) will epitomize the notion of information as process, not product.

Will Google Wave revitalize PR?

On Social Media Today, public relations specialist Valerie Maltoni explores the likely impact of Google Wave on the discipline of public relations. Wave is a sharp reminder that public relations is about “the public”--not “the media,” as much of contemporary PR practice has assumed. A wave will merge content, discussion, and live, real-time, shared judgment... reflecting the basic insight that “the truth” is not a fixed thing, but is instead an emergent reality that the public co-creates.

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.

media file 6.22.09 | Why nonprofits rule social media

Why nonprofits rule social media

In this Conversation Starter on the Harvard Business site, social media consultant Alexandra Samuel argues that the notable success of nonprofit organizations like Kiva in implementing social media strategies is a natural outgrowth of what the sector does best: build deep and explicitly accountable relationships with stakeholders. Businesses can experience similar success by adopting some nonprofit best practices, including: (1) avoid gimmicks, and instead speak to stakeholders’ core concerns; (2) give clients a high degree of decision-making freedom and control; (3) offer a mix of tangible and social benefits; (4) embrace the stakeholder community’s emergent social values; and (5) innovate within the boundaries of one’s core mission.

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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 June 22, 2009:

Why social media gimmicks don’t work

A short, sharp reality smackdown from social media guru Andy Sernovitz: Whatever get-rich scheme you are cooking up, forget it. Instead of trying to trick or bribe people into engaging with your product or service, just build a better product and customer experience... and love will follow.

Kiva: When nonprofit is the best business model

Stanford Social Innovation Review profiles Kiva, the groundbreaking peer-to-peer microfinance exchange, to learn how it became one of the fastest growing nonprofits in history. Surprisingly, a great part of its success has to do with its nonprofit status itself: By adopting a business model that maximizes social value and leaves profit on the table, Kiva has managed to attract a range of support services that have lowered its cost of doing business and allowed it to scale rapidly. Likewise, it has dodged the legal and regulatory challenges that would have accompanied any attempt to organize as a for-profit lender. And finally, it has been able to establish a steady, growing stream of capital from a virtual community that supports it precisely because it operates purely from a socially constructive agenda.

Maximizing the (non) profit motive

BusinessWeek covers the emergence of new corporate legal structures designed to make it easier for organizations to blend for-profit business models with socially constructive aims. While the law typically holds that a corporation’s primary responsibility is to maximize shareholder value, these new structures make it possible for a for-profit organization to incorporate a social-purpose agenda directly into its charter, and to behave in other ways that are more common to non-profits--raising money in the form of grants and charitable loans, for example. Likewise, they give non-profits new tools to raise capital and engage in for-profit activities, without having to construct elaborate workarounds.

Crowdsourcing: What it means for innovation

In BusinessWeek, innovation guru John Winsor explores the future of “crowdsourcing”--the practice of engaging individuals outside the traditional supply chain in the process of product and business system innovation. While some analysts fear that crowdsourcing will spell the end of the corporate design firm, and others worry that it will drive down the perceived value of new products and services, still others believe that customer participation and mass collaboration will usher in a new era in which customers become deeply invested in the success of the crowdsourced innovation and the enterprise that stands behind it.

Not all collaborations are created equal

On The Big Shift blog on the Harvard Business site, authors and management consultants John Hegel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison discuss “scalable collaboration”: a form of collaboration that moves beyond feel-good progressivity to a style of organizational behavior that delivers increasing returns over time. Three key traits distinguish collaborative styles that are scalable from those that are not: (1) They produce new knowledge and relationships versus specific solutions and results; (2) they are loosely organized in ways that easily admit new participants; and (3) they are designed to advance the group’s future capacity versus simply to leverage its existing strengths.

Got the old-media blues? There’s an app for that

Advertising Age reports on a new initiative by traditional print media firm Rodale to make digital content pay, via an iPhone app for its Men’s Health magazine brand. Users pay $1.99 for the app, which provides basic workout set instructions along with a system for tracking individual progress. Directly within the app, users can then buy additional workout sets to supplement the base set. This strategy opens up a source of revenue--paid subscriptions--that publishers have historically relied upon but has been hard to come by on the largely free Internet. The in-app purchase option is a feature of the new OS 3 for the iPhone.

media file 6.15.09 | Is online advertising in secular decline?

Is online advertising in secular decline?

MediaPost covers a new report by Wall Street investment firm JP Morgan that indicates the recent dip in online display advertising revenues may have less to do with the impact of the economic cycle and more to do with the exponential increase in online display inventory. While TV networks managed to hold the line on CPMs for premium offerings in the face of an influx of ad inventory from cable channels, the scale of growth in new online ad inventory from social networks is raising doubts whether premium online display outlets like Yahoo will be able to sustain current prices.

Note: We’ve been on an impromptu hiatus for the last few months while retooling the richmedium site to reflect our intensified research and practice in the field of social innovation: the process of organizing “global tribes” over digital networks to support innovations that address broadly recognized social needs. For organizations in media, information technology, consumer services, and for-profit and non-profit social enterprise, social innovation holds the power to unlock a new, sustainable blend of social and financial value. We welcome your comments and suggestions about our work.

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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 June 15, 2009:

Newspaper billions become Craigslist millions

In a Chart of the Day, Silicon Alley Insider depicts how dramatically Craigslist has rained down “creative destruction” on the classified advertising business, the key to the newspaper industry’s historic profitability. Newspaper classified advertising peaked at $16 billion in 2005, only to plummet to an estimated $5 billion in 2009. Meanwhile, Craigslist started a climb from under $20 million in 2005 to an estimated $100 million today. The $11 billion or so in lost revenue represents a graphic study in the ruthless way that the Internet drives cost out of markets.

The greatest change in media? It’s not what you think

On ClickZ, publishing guru Vin Crosbie asserts that the greatest change to hit the media market in the last 35 years was not search engines, social networking, or even the Internet itself. Instead, the real game-changer has been the revolution in supply and demand driven by the enormous explosion in availability of media of all types--TV, radio, video, print, and the web. The destruction of scarcity as an economic lever in the media business went unnoticed for too long by old media, and its current response--in efforts, for example, to save the dying newspaper business--illustrate that it still doesn’t understand that the ground rules for competition have fundamentally changed, and there’s no going back.

Public media needs new economic models

On MediaShift Idea Lab, nonprofit media executive Tony Shawcross argues that the time has come for public media organizations to explore new economic models that could inject much-needed incentives to innovate and excel in producing and delivering content that explicitly serves the public interest. The article describes several of the most promising funding models.

Kiva brings microloans to low-income entrepreneurs in US

Kiva, the groundbreaking Internet-based microlender that has revolutionized the category for entrepreneurs in developing countries, is launching a pilot project to serve low-income entrepreneurs in the United States, Techcrunch reports. Kiva sidesteps the regulatory problems that have hampered other Internet-based microfinance institutions such as Prosper, by delivering a 0 percent return to investors, making the entire transaction charitable--similar to a program-related investment, a charitable investment category pioneered by the Ford Foundation. (Note: At its current annual run-rate of more than $50 million in small loans, Kiva is making more than twice the amount in charitable loans than Ford, according to the foundation’s last published annual report.)

GovLoop: A social network to reinvent government

Internet Evolution blogger Rob Salkowitz reports on GovLoop, a Ning-based social network that assists federal, state, and local government employees to informally share information and best practices. The brainchild of a young Homeland Security staffer, GovLoop reaches over 12,000 public employees in the US and has emerged as a model for foreign governments of a learning community that encourages unstructured knowledge sharing, spontaneous conversations, boundary-crossing relationships, and open discussion... a phenomenon that the site founders call “Government 2.0.”

A Hippocratic Oath for managers

The Economist reports on a grass-roots movement among MBA students to establish a code of behavior for the profession. Such a movement dates back to the founding of the Harvard Business School in 1908, when the goal was to establish a set of professional behavioral standards similar to those in medicine and law, where a set of shared social values is one of the earmarks of both professions. But the move was stymied by the widespread view that the manager’s job was solely to maximize shareholder value. In a period in which the Internet is forcing transparency upon institutions of all stripes, a code of ethics for professional managers is now coming to be seen as a crucial requirement and powerful force for business success.

Does the world need the venture capital industry?

Who is that behind the curtain? Not the Wizard of Oz, but your local friendly venture capitalist, according to a new report released in June 2009 by the Kauffman Foundation. While the VC industry has convinced itself that it is indispensable to the success of US entrepreneurship, and VCs compensate themselves accordingly, in reality only about 16 percent of the fastest growing companies in the country are VC funded, the report states. One structural problem: Contemporary Internet plays require significantly less capital to gain scale than in the past, and entrepreneurs are quicker to cash out early. That portends a future where VC money will simply be less relevant to the most innovative entrepreneurs. The New York Times reports.

media file 3.16.09 | In downturn, consumers choose green

Despite economic crisis, consumers value brands’ commitment to social purpose

Marketing communications firm Edelman announces the results of its second annual global study measuring consumer attitudes toward companies and brands that engage in social purpose marketing. According to the study, 68 percent of consumers stated they would remain loyal to a brand during a recession if it supports a good cause. Forty-two percent said that if two products are of the same quality and price, commitment to a social purpose trumps factors like design, innovation, and brand loyalty when choosing one brand over the other. Fifty-two percent stated they would be more likely to recommend a brand that supports a good cause over one that does not, and 54 percent said they would help a brand promote a product if there were a good cause behind it.

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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 impact of open media and social networks on global business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for March 16, 2009:

Social innovators can lead through economic crisis

On INSEAD Knowledge: While the international community galvanizes around the financial crisis at the expense of other pressing global concerns, socially innovative businesses have a unique opportunity to fill the gap via money-making enterprises and initiatives that advance the cause of human and environmental sustainability. Social innovators must make sure that the initiative is sustainable and will stand the test of time, even in the face of great economic upheaval, or risk taking a “trust hit” that could undermine its downstream chances for success.

Governing Facebook in an open and transparent way

On The Facebook Blog, founder Mark Zuckerberg announces the publication of two documents intended to shift the social networking site’s relationship with its users: “Facebook Principles,” an open policy framework that the company says will guide its business practices and decision-making; and “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities,” which will replace the site’s existing Terms of Use. Writes Zuckerberg: “Our main goal at Facebook is to help make the world more open and transparent. We believe that if we want to lead the world in this direction, then we must set an example by running our service in this way.”

Reinventing your business model

While fundamental business model innovations fueled the breakout success of Apple’s iPod and led to the market dominance of retail giants Wal-Mart and Target, less than ten percent of innovation investment at global companies is focused on developing new business models. Why? According to innovation specialist Mark Johnson on the Harvard Business site, the reason is that few organizations fully understand their current business model to begin with--the premise behind its development, its natural interdependencies, and its strengths and limitations. So they don’t know when they can leverage their core business and when success requires a new business model.

Assessing innovation metrics

While two-thirds of top executives consider innovation to be one of their top three strategic priorities, few take steps to effectively measure the impact of the overall innovation process on their organization’s value, according to a recent study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Instead, executives focus on relatively simple output metrics, such as increases in revenue, rather than potentially more instructive indicators, such as ROI or net present value of the innovation portfolio.

The music business isn’t dying; the old business model is

TechCrunch covers a talk by Topspin Media CEO Ian Rogers on the future of the music industry. The old hits-driven business model is giving way to a new model that will permit a broad middle class of artists to support themselves by using the web to promote their music, shows, and merchandise. As an example, Rogers cites David Byrne and Brian Eno’s album, “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today,” which was distributed digitally by the artists and in less than two months earned the equivalent of a traditional music label advance.

Hey, magazines: Are you in or are you out?

Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco ponders the magazine industry’s seeming paralysis in the face of digital transition, and asks: Do its leaders have the guts to radically reinvent their business models, or have they given up on publishing, if its future doesn’t include the same high-flying revenues and salaries that defined its recent past?

Foundation starts health policy news service

The New York Times reports on the Kaiser Family Foundation’s launch of a new online health news service, designed to fill a gap in serious health policy news coverage left by the decline of mainstream news organizations. The launch underscores the emergence of so-called “advocacy journalism”: serious, professional journalistic efforts undertaken--mostly online--by nonprofit cause advocacy groups.

media file 3.9.09 | The coming end of old media

The end of tangible media is clearly in sight

On his Micro Persuasions blog, marketing guru Steve Rubel predicts that by 2014, almost all forms of tangible media--including newspapers, magazines, books, DVDs, boxed software and video games--will either be in sharp decline or completely extinct. For proof, Rubel asks, “When was the last time you bought a CD? Exactly.” With green-aware millennials set to become the dominant demographic in the US by 2010, Rubel says that the US is fast becoming a society that consumes media entirely in digital format--and the global media market is only one or two steps behind.

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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 impact of open media and social networks on global business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for March 9, 2009:

Old media isn’t completely deaf: The Guardian offers full-text RSS feeds

Mashable reports on The Guardian UK’s decision to make the full text of its articles available to users via RSS. While conventionally thought to be a bad business move that leaves advertising dollars on the table, with this gambit The Guardian is banking on the fact that the growing global audience of RSS users vastly prefers to get full vs. partial feeds in their browsers. “The Guardian instantly gains an advantage on every other newspaper in the world,” Mashable states.

Newspapers pursue a content sharing consortium

Editor & Publisher reports on discussions among Northeast-based metro and regional newspapers to share content with each other, sidestepping their contractual arrangements with the Associated Press. Beyond their frustration with the financial strictures imposed by the AP, publishers expressed that they were motivated by a desire to access higher quality content from non-competitive sources.

Blueprint for the Next Newsroom

On MediaShift Idea Lab, 2007 Knight News Challenge winner Chris O’Brien reports on the Next Newsroom project’s proposal to design and build the ideal newsroom of the future. The proposal calls for a fully integrated multimedia news environment built on the principles of community, innovation, collaboration, transparency, and embracing all platforms. The report includes a link to the proposal, which is available via a public wiki.

Nonprofit news web sites rise as successors to traditional newspapers

The New York Times reports on a new breed of online journalism sites that is striving to fill the void left by the decline of traditional print newspapers. Offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists, their news coverage and investigative reporting stand out in an online news landscape dominated by opinion, gossip, and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs. And to make ends meet, financially they mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are organized as nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, donors, and audience contributions.

Murdoch to “cynics”: Newspapers will survive

On the Editor & Publisher site, media magnate Rupert Murdoch slams doomsayers who are predicting that the Internet will kill off newspapers. These “misguided cynics” fail to grasp that the online world is potentially a huge new market of information-hungry consumers, The Wall Street Journal owner says. Among these misguided cynics: journalists “who are too busy writing their own obituary to be excited by the opportunity.” To capitalize on online opportunities, Murdoch said the WSJ was planning to offer three tiers of content online: free news; a subscriber-level service; and a third premium service of reader-customizable “high-end financial news and analysis.”

Africans and their mobiles, part 1: Numbers and usage patterns

In the first of a two-part series, ReadWriteWeb summarizes the key statistics that make Africa an intriguing forerunner of an emerging global, mobile, digital marketplace. Left behind in the broadband build-out that developing countries experienced in the last decade, Africa has jumped ahead to a high-speed mobile digital environment bereft of walled gardens, proprietary service packages, and contractual restrictions. One result: Africa is home to the largest mobile payment network in the world.

Africans and their mobiles, part 2: Using mobile phones for social good

In this second of a two-part series on mobile technology usage on the African continent, ReadWriteWeb reports on how financial scarcity has spawned a wave of digitally based social innovation. Because most mobile phone users on the continent choose fixed-cost, prepaid, month-to-month plans versus variable-cost, postpaid, long-term contracts, users pay close attention to minutes used. In response, mobile providers offer “Please Call Me” (PCM) service that permits mobile phone users to send free text messages to friends, inviting them to call back. In South Africa, 30 million PCM messages are sent every day, in a country with a total population of 47 million. Jumping on this trend, social service agencies are embracing PCM for health care, political mobilization, and other cause-related purposes.

media file 1.5.09 | Design thinking: A new strategic paradigm

Design thinking: A new strategic paradigm

To its proponents, it’s a new paradigm for product development and strategic marketing. To its detractors, it’s a pair of empty buzzwords. Either way, it’s called “design thinking”--a mashup of the strategic marketing and design disciplines that is being credited with bringing great new consumer products and services to market in record time, with startling success rates. Brandweek explores the phenomenon and asks: If designers are such great strategic thinkers, then why did it take them so long to land a punch on the marketing establishment?

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for January 5, 2009:

The coming creativity boom

From the ashes of the financial crisis, what is likely to emerge? A new and sudden boom of entrepreneurial creativity and invention, writes Forbes author and futurist George Gilder, based on four intersecting technological developments: cloud computing, advanced graphics processing, nanotechnology, and green building materials. The rapid advancements that these breakthrough technologies will make in the near future will dwarf any losses incurred in the current market collapse--demonstrating that creativity is the ultimate source of freedom and power, the author asserts.

Using design to crack society’s problems

Fast Company profiles Participle, a London-based agency that specializes in applying design solutions to intractable social problems. One example: redesigning healthcare delivery for chronic disease sufferers, shifting the focus away from hospital-based care to community-based solutions. Another example: repackaging support services for seniors in collaboration with Britain’s Sky TV. According to the article, Participle represents a new wave of design firms that believe that many of the institutions and systems set up in the 20th century are failing, and that design can help to build new ones better suited to the demands of 21st century.

Agile programming: A good model for media innovation?

Can journalists learn something about creativity and innovation from the software community? MediaShift Idea Lab blogger Rich Gordon chronicles his experience mashing top-tier journalism and computer science students together to create next-generation media development teams. From the start, the computer science students set the tone and pace for the collaboration by introducing cutting-edge “agile programming” methodologies to the journalistic creative process. The experiment offers a potential role model for building successful media projects in the interactive age.

Obama’s seven lessons for radical innovators

As Barack Obama prepares to take the reins of the presidency, Havas Media Lab Director Umair Haque reflects on what got him there: a radically innovative approach to organizational management that caught all his competitors flat-footed. Writing on his Edge Economy blog on the Harvard Business site, Haque lists seven qualities of the new kind of organization that such management innovation produced: self-organizing design; resilience in the face of threats; minimal attention to gamesmanship; maximum attention to authentic purpose; a unifying approach to the market; “thick power”--the power to inspire and lead; and an embrace of the world-changing power of ideals. In the business world, only a small handful of companies have yet to adopt anything quite like this kind of radically innovative management approach--Google, among these few--but its seven features represent the starting point for anyone wishing to build an institution suited for the 21st century.

Unintended consequences: Ten years under the DMCA

The Electronic Frontier Foundation marks the tenth anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with a review of its negative impact on free speech, scientific research, innovation, competition, privacy, and commerce. Did anything go right? Not really, the report concludes in exhaustive detail.

Evidence of a global super organism

Is Google an avatar of a global, super-intelligent organism that transcends anything we have seen or imagined on this earth? According to Kevin Kelly on The Technium, that’s exactly right. A planetary-wide super organism is emerging from the sum of the world’s digital infrastructure, with its own life, mind, intelligence, and consciousness. How far away are we from its birth? “Closer than you think,” Kelly writes.