lead/marke | ralf schwartz

Afraid of the Web? Get a Glimpse of what 3D printing will do to your world!

"MAKIES is an action doll creator: a player/customer can design their own action doll – features, hair, clothes and everything – & we then 3D print it uniquely to them, build & dress it, and send on to them within 3 weeks of ordering."

Via Makie.

And, please, do not even think about everybody having their own 3D printer at home! This will become your worst nightmare - just after the web ...

Marketing Lacks the Start-Up Gene!

Our @wiwo-column just went online:

"Ein Marketing mit erdrückendem Korsett aus starren Strukturen, Prozessen und Ritualen passt nicht mehr in die heutige Zeit.

Das Marketing benötigt das 'Start-up-Gen', um zu neuem Leben zu erwachen."

Please read the full post at Wirtschaftswoche.

Steve Blank: 9 Deadliest Startup Sins

"1. Assuming you know what the customer wants

2. The “I know what features to build” flaw

3. Focusing on the launch date

4. Emphasizing execution instead of testing, learning, and iteration

5. Writing a business plan that doesn’t allow for trial and error

6. Confusing traditional job titles with a startup’s needs

7. Executing on a sales and marketing plan

8. Prematurely scaling your company based on a presumption of success

9. Management by crisis, which leads to a death spiral"

Please read the full post with all the detailed explanations here.

Got an Idea? Take it to Kickstarter!

Yes, you know Kickstarter. But did you imagine how potent it may be to 'kickstart' your ideas, innovation, start-up?

"This wristwatch for geeks project asked for 100k US$ in funding. They have passed 10 Million US$ now! And its still 8 days to go. Incredible!" - Via Markus Breuer.

Have a close look at the above Kickstarter project:
Pebble: E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android.

Apple and Samsung: 99%(!) Share of Total Phone Market Profits

"Of the vendors tracked (public companies who report mobile phone divisional performance), Apple obtained 73% of operating profits, Samsung 26% and HTC 1%".

All quotes and jpg via asymco.

Again it is about disruption:

"So if the industry is booming but the majority of participants in the industry are loss making (and surprisingly so) then what is going on?

There are two answers: new market disruption and low end disruption".

Dan Wieden on Advertising [video]

 
Via Neil Perkin.

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle "Answer Four Questions to Improve Innovation"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

There are obstacle to innovation everywhere. Risk aversion, lack of resources, lack of enthusiasm, not enough time, not enough ideas, too many ideas – the list is potentially endless.

You can help your organisation be more innovative right now (today!) by answering these four questions:

1. What is one idea that I can execute right now to make things work better? We often mistake generating ideas for innovating. But to innovate, you have to execute new ideas that create value. One way to create value is to improve your processes. I’ll be you have plenty of ideas about how you could make things work better. So execute one of them right now.

   Then do the same thing tomorrow.

   By getting into the habit of executing ideas you can get over one of the biggest innovation obstacles. Not all of them work, but the net value of a great idea is zero. It’s only be testing them out that you find the value in your ideas.

2. What would I do differently if everyone reporting to me was a volunteer? When you answer this question, you start identifying obstacles for your team. And you shift from a directive approach to a supporting one. This usually leads to better innovation.

   Identifying these obstacles might give you some really good ideas for your answer to question number 1 too.

3. If we were starting our business right now, would we do it this way? If you were starting a brand-new newspaper right now, would you invest millions of dollars into an editorial system that prevents you from easily sharing stories between print and digital outlets?

   Probably not.

   And yet, most big newspapers have systems that do exactly that.

   The problem is, their new competitors don’t have these. The new news organisations and those of the future won’t have to deal with this obstacle.

   Answering this question will help you identify the structural and processual obstacles that your firm faces. And it will give you some ideas about potential business model innovations.

4. Who can I connect with to generate some interesting new ideas? Most great ideas come from the intersection between two different bodies of knowledge. You may know your field extremely well. So who can you connect with that has a completely different body of knowledge?

   Think of someone, and connect up. Send them an email, or a tweet. Invite them for a coffee.

   One way or another, make a new connection.

Innovation requires the execution of ideas. By answering these questions, you generate new ideas. By acting on these new ideas, you can get into the habit of innovating.

It may be that none of these questions trigger huge game-changing innovations.

But then, you won’t know that until you test them out, will you?

 

(ralf says: Good questions! To illustrate the first one a little bit more, I linked a post I wrote in Jan, 2011: Doing Things Right for the First Time.)

Tim is a lecturer at The University of Queensland Business School. He researches, writes, teaches and consults on topics relating to effective innovation management, with an emphasis on studying innovation networks. He blogs at The Innovation Leadership Network. Twitter: @timkastelle

Social Business und die Angst vor dem Sozialen Unternehmen (in German)

Alle reden über Social Media, die wenigsten denken es konsequent zu Ende. Zwei unterschiedliche - sich nicht widersprechende, sondern ergänzende - Perspektiven:

01 - Unsere @wiwo-Kolumne:
Von Social Media zum Social Business
Social Business ist das sozial handelnde - im Sinne Ökosysteme kreierende - Business. Ich erläutere dies am Beispiel des Siegeszuges der Eisenbahn.

02 - Meine @thethirdclub-Kolumne:
Wer hat Angst vorm Sozialen Unternehmen?
Fast schon muss man sagen, man kann nicht nicht sozial sein. Warum wehren sich trotzdem so viele dagegen?

Viel Vergnügen!

Start Disrupting Industries

I had to quote Michael's entire post for you:

"You either build something that makes the world a better place or you don’t. There are complete industries built on creating arbitrary value for the world (investment banking). And there are complete industries built around innovation and creating value for the world (technology).

If you’re an entrepreneur where your success is built around the value you create for the world (e.g. Apple) , you have an opportunity to disrupt entire industries. The world doesn’t need another “Groupon for X”; we need more companies disrupting archaic institutions like healthcare, education, insurance, government, and banking. We need more companies like Uber that receive cease & desist letters from their city to shut down. And more companies like ProFounder, Votizen, BankSimple, Art.sy and Massive Health that utilize the power of the web to democratize entire industries.

So, the next time you think about starting or joining a company, think about your individual impact on the world. You have a real opportunity to make it better." - Michael Karnjanaprakorn

You may prolong Michael's list of industries by energy, automobile, telecoms, publishing houses, ... almost every industry coming to your mind.

Design as a Means of Business Improvement

"Design is shrinking the gap between what a product does and why it exists.

Designing is not just about picking the right font or gradient. Stop thinking about design in terms of wire frames or visual style; it is about the product as a whole.

Designing is figuring out the purpose of your product and how you orient everything else around it. And that means that everyone within a company plays a role in the design process.

And that means that everyone in a company needs to learn design literacy. It’s a hard task. Everyone tells their MBA-wielding friends that they should learn to code: “Anyone can do it,” or “It’s going to be the new literacy.” People think code is the basis of a working product. But what about design? How often are people told that they should “learn to design”? 

While everyone involved should know how design works, they should also understand that it can be practiced on anything you make.

The design instinct, above all, is about viewing the world around you as a place filled with opportunities to add more thoughtfulness and care.

Thus, your organization deserves to be just as well-designed as your homepage, and your company’s tweets as crafted as your account confirmation emails.

Which is to say that design should be considered a facet of everything you do, as well as a means of improving your business. Imagine if your site were to slow down. What would you do? You’d try to make it faster, or find an engineer that could. You’d make a conscious design decision to make your site quicker to use, because you understand that doing so will make your offerings more accessible and user-friendly.

Apply that principle of improvement to everything else." - Sahil Lavingnia

Via collaborativefund.

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle > "The Best Social Media Strategy of All Time!"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

I constantly run across blog posts, emails, and spam comments on the blog that promise to tell you the perfect strategy for getting a higher PageRank for your website, or more twitter followers, or a higher Klout score.

And the problem with all of these strategies is that they are faulty. They might results in a higher PageRank, or more twitter followers, or a higher Klout score, but they don’t have any effect at all on what really matters: impact.

And the fact that these “strategies” don’t change your impact is a big problem.

But unlike all of these scam artists, I actually do have the best social media strategy of all time. And because I’m a nice guy, I’m doing to give it to you for free.

Ready?

Here it is:

Do awesome work.

If you do awesome work, it doesn’t matter what keywords you use in the meta tags. People will respond to it.

If you do awesome work, it doesn’t matter what time you tweet about it. People will find it.

Here are the principles of the Do Awesome Work strategy:

• There are no shortcuts. There. Are. No. Shortcuts. If you get twitter followers by following a bunch of random people so that they’ll follow you back, it doesn’t help you spread your ideas, because they don’t care about your ideas. I can’t say this enough – there are no shortcuts.
• You have to do the work. Don’t follow your dreams, follow your effort. All genuine social media success is built on actually putting in the hard work.
• Social media success without awesome work is a pyrrhic victory. Let’s say you do manage to get thousands of twitter followers and a high PageRank, and tons of people go to your site, only to find that the content sucks. Then what? Have you actually gained anything? No.

  You are much better off with a modest number of followers and so-so search results, but with great content. Because then people will engage with it, and you will have impact – and that’s what really matters.

Why can I give this idea away for free? Because the simple fact of the matter is that most people aren’t willing to put in the effort – they want the shortcut.

And that doesn’t do any of us any good.

I want you to do awesome work. Because then I can read it, and be inspired. And I can think about it, and build on it. And if we’re lucky, maybe we can do some awesome work together

So please, follow the best social media strategy of all time:

Do awesome work.

(ralf says:
Do Start Today!)
 

Tim is a lecturer at The University of Queensland Business School. He researches, writes, teaches and consults on topics relating to effective innovation management, with an emphasis on studying innovation networks. He blogs at The Innovation Leadership Network. Twitter: @timkastelle

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle: "Your Customer Isn’t 'Everyone' - Seven Innovation Thoughts Triggered by Peter Drucker"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

Of all the management writers I’ve read, Peter Drucker probably generates more interesting quotes per page than anyone. Tom Peters and Joseph Schumpeter come close too. Here are six thoughts triggered by reading his book Management Challenges for the 21st Century:

1. "And yet very few institutions know anything about the noncustomers—very few of them even know that they exist, let alone know who they are. And even fewer know why they are not customers. Yet it is with the noncustomers that changes always start."

   Drucker is making a slightly different point here – that we need to look outside of our normal networks to innovate. True. But also, your customer isn’t “everyone.” Even Coke has more noncustomers than customers in the world. A big part of strategy is making the choice of who your customer will be. This choice is based on value, however:

2. "The starting point has to be what customers consider value. The starting point has to be the assumption—an assumption amply proven by all our experience—that the customer never buys what the supplier sells. What is value to the customer is always something quite different from what is value or quality to the supplier. This applies as much to a business as to a university or to a hospital."

   Innovators often don’t know what their idea is for. This is a strong argument for two things: empathy and experiments.

3. "Everything improved or new needs therefore first to be tested on a small scale, that is, it needs to be PILOTED. The way to do this is to find somebody within the enterprise who really wants the new. As said before, everything new gets into trouble. And then it needs a champion. It needs somebody who says: “I am going to make this succeed,” and who then goes to work on it. And this person needs to be somebody whom the organization respects. This need not even be somebody within the organization. A good way to pilot a new product or new service is often to find a customer who really wants the new, and who is willing to work with the producer on making truly successful the new product or the new service."

   New ideas need champions. This is a critical part of piloting or prototyping, which in turn drives experimentation. This is one of the best ways to find out what customers actually value – testing.

4. "Every organization operates on a Theory of the Business, that is, a set of assumptions as to what its business is, what its objectives are, how it defines results, who its customers are, what the customers value and pay for. Strategy converts this Theory of the Business into performance."

   Theories of Business need to be tested – this is how to design the experiments. Start with the assumptions in your business model, then test them to see if they are true.

5. "An entrepreneur who does not learn how to manage will not last long. A management that does not learn to innovate will not last long. In fact, … business—and every other organization today—has to be designed for change as the norm and to create change rather than react to it.

   The main reason is that a policy of systematic innovation produces the mindset for an organization to be a change leader. It makes the entire organization see change as an opportunity."

   The consequence of this is that innovation is a process, which can be managed.

6. "The first change policy, therefore, throughout the entire institution, has to be Organized Abandonment. The change leader puts every product, every service, every process, every market, every distribution channel, every customer and end-use, on trial for its life. And it does so on a regular schedule. The question has to be asked—and asked seriously—“If we did not do this already, would we, knowing what we now know, go into it?” If the answer is “no,” the reaction must not be “Let’s make another study.” The reaction must be “What do we do now?” The enterprise is committed to change. It is committed to action."

   If we were starting today, would we do this? This is the blank slate approach described by Jeffrey Phillips, and it is an important tool for evaluating your business model.

7. "To try to make the future is highly risky. It is less risky, however, than not to try to make it. A goodly proportion of those attempting to do what this chapter discusses will surely not succeed. But, predictably, no one else will."

   Or, as Wayne Gretzky said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” You improve your chances of succeeding by systematically looking at the drivers of innovation opportunities.

Here it is in a nutshell: Innovation drives change, and change drives growth. We can’t know in advance what will work, so we need to use experiments to discover what customers value. It’s risky, but less risky than doing nothing.

(ralf says:
How to comment on this? With just another quote!

8. “People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.” - Peter F. Drucker)

Tim is a lecturer at The University of Queensland Business School. He researches, writes, teaches and consults on topics relating to effective innovation management, with an emphasis on studying innovation networks. He blogs at The Innovation Leadership Network. Twitter: @timkastelle

The Ultimate Brand & Business Challenge: The Digital Dump

Via GOOD. Click for a larger view.

Innovation Needs a Focussed CEO

"... Trying to implement more innovation is noble, but requires a lot of work, work that will distract the business from its normally efficient, effective processes.

Middle managers who’ve spent years developing robust processes to achieve short term financial success are loathe to see their work go to waste and don’t want to distract their people and processes from what they do best.

Thus, the importance of “focus”. If CEOs really want innovation, they must focus, focus, focus on innovation. A one time off-handed request for more innovation simply won’t create much change..."

Via innovationexcellence.

Please read Misserfolgsstrategien alter Männer, and Mark Zuckerbergs Erfolgsregeln, too.

Mark Zuckerbergs Erfolgsregeln @wiwo

Ich habe in unserer Wiwo-Kolumne mal etwas zu Mark Zuckerberg, dem Netz und der Dringlichkeit des Wandels für alle anderen geschrieben: Mark Zuckerbergs Erfolgsregeln.

Four Comscore Videos: Future of eCommerce, Mobile, Online Video, Social Media

 

 

 

 

Via Comscore.

brandpoems(3): Dear Brand, "If Your Dreams Don't Scare You, They're not Big Enough"

Via ralfschwartz. Via workman.

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle > "Don’t Be First to Market, Be First to Scale"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

Often when people have an idea for a great new product or service, they rush to be first to market with it. We keep hearing about first-mover advantage and how you need it.

The only problem with first-move advantage is that it doesn’t seem to exist. The academic research on the topic shows that there is no such thing.

[L/M NET] Adrian Ho "We Build Modern Brands - Defined By What They Do"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

So Ad Fed have asked me to talk about the evolution of Zeus Jones next week.

While there’s a bunch of things that I could cover, I think the most interesting thing about our evolution is how little resemblance the company of today bears to the company we imagined right up to the day we opened our doors. We weren’t just a bit wrong about things, we were dramatically wrong. In almost all circumstances, our imagination around the specifics of our business was simply more naive and (thankfully) much less interesting than the reality has turned out to be.

What Your CRM Might Learn from Monterey Bay Aquarium

I know, I know: What might we possibly learn from an aquarium? We are the consumer brands, we are the experts, the gurus, we have seen it all. We understand, we transcend. We inspire - not that Monterey Bay Aquarium.

All wrong!

First of all the Monterey Bay Aquarium is a fantastic place to be - not just because of its animals, architecture, and surrounding, but because of its caring wo/men, because of all those people sharing a vision and a spirit. Because of the culture you feel immediately when talking to any person being employed or volunteering time and resource there.

And this is the base you desperately need. Because: First of all you need every single one to truly live the brand, the positioning, image, and personality. All else follows!

Secondly the aquarium is a brand you can walk into! Think about that, please.

Thirdly, the learning (now, after you know a little bit more about the Aquarium):