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 ...

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle > "Eight Business Models, and Why They’re Important"

(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)

 

The term Business Model is one that gets thrown around a lot these days. Even though it might sound like a buzzword to you, it’s important to understand what a business model is, and how they are useful.

One of the confusing things about the business model concept is that there are a wide variety of models of business models, and it seems as though everyone that talks about them makes up a new one. This can be frustrating if you are trying to figure out how to use the concept.

At their core, all business models address this questions: how do we sustainably deliver value to our customers? In this instance, the sustainable part refers to your organisation – how can you deliver value so that you’re still around in the future?

Entrepreneurship: The Present Order is an Unreliable and Cowardly Indicator of the Possible

"There are businesses that succeed by doing traditional things slightly better than the competition.

And there are businesses that redraw the landscape entirely, creating needs we never knew we had and remoulding our sense of what we have to have in order to be happy …

Entrepreneurship depends on a sense that the present order is an unreliable and cowardly indicator of the possible.

The absence of certain practices and products is deemed by entrepreneurs to be neither right nor inevitable, merely evidence of conformity and lack of imagination…" - Alain de Botton, WIRED

Via wearethedigitalkids.

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle > You Have a Choice - Act!

(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 plenty of excuses for not innovating – for not taking steps to change things. However, if you see a way to make things better and you don’t do anything, then you’re letting your situation control you. If you’re dissatisfied with the situation, you have to change the way you act.

Here is the way that Tom Peters puts it in a post from Innovation Excellence:

I believe there is one and only one source of innovation – pissed off people.

@TheThirdClub - or: To All the Brave Entrepreneurial Wo/Men: Creativity & Innovation Desperately Need You!

(Note: This is a cross post with my distinctive leadership blog)

We just founded The Third Club!
Get to know more about it here (ya, it's German).

(Polaroid by Douglas Wilson > available here) 

At the moment we are 12 brave wo/men - but want to allure all brave wo/men out there! Just to give you a very small hint on what we are talking about please inhale the following list.

(Yeah, I know, some 20.000+ great people are not on that list.
But you do know: there is no definitive list of great people.)

This is not about names. The personalities beyond them will give you a pretty good picture what I am talking about. They are the wild-card characters of entrepreneurial personalities and spirit, of motivation, engagement, and dedication I would love to see @TheThirdClub:

[L/M NET] Helge Tenno > The Game Changer: Presence & Proof

(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)

 

What we have done up till now is limit our thinking of what online can do based on a narrow view of what marketing can do. But what happens when marketing changes?

Traditional advertising and design has one goal: to deliver a promise, either based on what the consumer wants to become, or what the brand wants to become. All traditional marketing, advertising and design is built around this core idea: the transmission of an idea from a sender to a receiver. Inside this mindset digital offers some abilities that are new, and speeds up some abilities that are old. But in essence digital is nothing more than a technological option – a choice between newspaper, billboard, TV, radio or internet ++.

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle > "Innovation Obstacle: Bureaucracy?"

(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)

 

What is the innovation that led to civilization?

There are some interesting answers to this question in Why the West Rules, For Now by Ian Morris. As part of his research, Morris has developed a Social Development Index, which he uses to track the progress of civilizations from 14000 BC to present. The index tracks improvements in areas such as energy capture (both as food and as fuel), organizational capability, technology development, and information sharing capacity.

Here is what the graph shows (taken from this .pdf that summarizes the research):

The first big jump happened between 2000 and 1000 BC, indicated by the very crude arrow that I’ve added. What was the innovation that caused that jump?

The invention of Bureaucracy.

Morris (and many other historians) argue that it was the invention of bureaucracy that actually triggered the development of agriculture, written communication, and other tools that are necessary for people to undertake complex tasks.

Bureaucracy is one of the most important innovations in human history – without it, we’d still be in caves. So why does it get such a bad rap whenever we talk about innovation? It’s nearly impossible to discuss innovation within organisations without hearing complaints about bureaucracy and bureaucrats.

The problem isn’t actually with bureaucracy. Bureaucracy makes systems, supports the development of routines, and gives us some constraints – which are actually essential to innovation (see here and here for examples). We need all of these things to innovate.

The problem with bureaucracy is when we follow rules simply for the sake of following rules. This is another form of path dependence, which leads to lock-in on sub-optimal systems. The problem is with bureaucratic systems that don’t support strategy – these stifle innovation.

Bureaucracy is actually a neutral term, like aerodynamics. To call a car “aerodynamically designed” is a nonsense – all cars have aerodynamics. It’s just that Teslas and Porsches have excellent aerodynamics, while minivans and SUVs have terrible aerodynamics.

In the same way we can have excellent bureaucracy, which supports innovation, and terrible bureaucracy, which obstructs innovation.

Bureaucracy isn’t actually an innovation obstacle, but bad bureaucracy is.

(ralf says:
And now we would need a word for 'good bureaucracy'.
A bureaucracy fostering innovation, speed, acceleration of processes, supporting the individual, empowering curiosity, beginner's mind, outliers! ...)

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 Creative Adult is the Child Who Survived" [Quote]

Via schoengeistig.

The web essentially is a ... [Quote]

“The web essentially is a planetary-scale nervous system where individual minds take on the role of synapses, firing electrical pattern-signals to one another at light speed - the net effect being an astonishing increase in creative output.

Jason Silva, Venezuelan-American television personality, filmmaker, gonzo journalist and founding producer/host for Current TV, Connecting All The Dots, Dec 10, 2010"

Via amiquote.

"tumblr should buy a country - we’ll all be forever alone, together"

There is very much truth in these following words, found in tumblr, expressing the feelings and sensations of young, mindful people of all ages, interested in art, design, aesthetics, beauty, ugliness, horror, politics, living, networking.

Tumblr is the individual, daily, small revolution:

"I think tumblr should buy a country so all of us can relocate there permanently. It’ll have nation-wide free wireless internet. We can live in houses according to blog categories and we’ll stalk the good looking people on tumblr from an awkward distance. The only foods on our diet will be pizza and nutella. And we’ll all have a gazillion cats who dance. Of course, a HP Marathon once a week with the regular Misfits and Spongebob. Unicorns will be our chosen form of transportation. At tumblrland, we’ll embrace each others’ awkwardness and best of all, our humors will finally be properly appreciated. And we’ll all be forever alone, together."

Via workman, accumulating some 133.000 notes.

Tumblr is the most advanced, most fashionable social network. It might even be the future of blogging, sharing, or archiving personal information and knowledge in the cloud.

That is why you should watch it carefully!
But don't break it!

My tumblr: this message is to wide to fit your screen.

Distinctive Leadership: CEOs and Managers of the World Breathe a Sigh of Relief on Steve Jobs' Resignation

As Steve Jobs' resignation is not just a leadership issue, but also an innovation and value creation issue, I repost my distinctive leadership post here:

"CEOs and managers may respire. Their hardship is finally over. After Steve's resignation nobody - they hope - will compare them to Steve again.

They all hated to be compared to a phenomenon. They all hated to be confronted with expectations only a Steve Jobs could live up to.

And they had a great excuse: he was the only one, there was no other coming near to his achievements. Yes, he was a phenomenon, and they themselves were great managers. They could live with that.

I must disenthrall them all, it's even worse: they all could become a Steve Jobs, they all could innovate, they all could transcend markets, they all could build Informal Markets (as I call them), they all could introduce revolutionary business models, and realize them successfully. No excuses apply.

Leonardo da Vinci on Innovation

“Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works.

You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else.

The trick is the doing something else.”

Leonardo da Vinci, Italian polymath; painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, writer (1452-1519)

Via.

The Automobile Innovation Delusion or The Art of Building the No-Go Car

Now we finally got it - the Parking Assistant!

Longing for some years now to find it in a car, not to have to steer it, to drive it backwards, to leave control with a machine. Just great!

But why did we long for a Parking Assistant? Because those bloody cars grew so big that we cannot cope with its sizes and dimensions any more. Cars crash our horizons, our parking lots, our garages - and them car makers couldn't care less. Just great!

Now they innovated again, gave birth to this marvelous gadget of Parking Assistant - instead of doing their homework in the first place. And we have to pay for that lazyness and ignorance. Just great!

True innovation in the car industry would imply building:

Thinking Outside the Facebook-Box!

More than ever you will have to start thinking outside the box - outside the facebook box that is! Facebook is a trap.

Via thisisnthappiness.

More than ever you might learn now - by observing what happens within Google Plus - how vulnerable social networks are. The more vulnerable the more closed they are.

Graeme Lipschitz: A Few Short Ideas on Google+ to Get its Scope

To start early with G+ (and brief your agency accordingly so they do not oversleep like they did with facebook) you should get at least a slight idea of its potential:

- Google Plus and Docs = collaborative publishing on the fly.
- Google Plus and Youtube = exponential video sharing.
- Google Plus and Latitude = Foursquare killer.
- Google Plus and Translate = a true social media Babel fish.
- Google Plus and Sites = Facebook Fan page killer.
- Google Plus and Adwords = a viable, trackable and ROI effective monetisation model for social media.

Read it all at Google+ is the golden ticket to the chocolate factory of social media. Via Nico.

Killing Innovation with a Gag Order!

(Note for all my German friends reading this blog: A gag order is no command to be funny from now on!)

Killing innovation with a gag order? How come?

Very easy. A muzzle is a muzzle is a muzzle. If there is one gag order there are others. If there is one official gag order there are dozens of informal ones. If there are dozens of informal gag orders people find scissors already in their heads.

Scissors inside our heads imply cutting truth, reality, critique - as long as it takes to please those in power, the CEO, the boss, the media, politicians.

Pleasing the powerful means shutting up at all - just clapping our hands, nodding our heads off.

Shutting up at all implies there will be no new information, no new horizons, no new developments, no change, no progress.

There will be no new directions, no new routes to walk, no parting the ways. No experiments, no risk, no fun.

Please stay away from corporations, parties, and societies where people are shut down. Shutting down the new individuality, independence, and impatience of people implies committing suicide - as a brand, as a corporation, as a party, as a society. And: without sensing your own death.
You will be dead from the inside - no matter how colourful your issued statements are. Killed by silence. Killed by a gag order. Think before you act.

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle > Our Job is to Invent the Future, revisited

(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)

 

If we’re trying to innovate, our job is to invent the future. That’s why I was struck by this quote from Ray Kurzweil from a few years ago:

I’m an inventor, and I started looking at long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it was finished, not the world in which it started.

This short quote hits on several important points:

• We have to be thinking about the future because innovation always takes much longer than we expect it to: innovation is a three part process – idea generation, idea selection and execution, and idea diffusion. In particular, idea execution can often take a (very!) long time, as can idea diffusion.
• Innovation requires vision: the first part of the process, idea generation, requires vision. While there is often an overemphasis on ideation, innovation does always start with a great idea.

  

• We need a methodology for thinking about the future: one way or another, we need to think about where the world is heading. There are many ways to do this. We can make sure that in addition to tending to our core business, we also spend some time finding out what is going on out on the edges. We can use collaborative methods, as outlined in The Open Foresighting project (that link is to Venessa Miemis’ blog – go there and scroll down to the Futures Thinking links in the right column for more great resources in this area). We can use scenario planning – here is a recent version discussed on The Long Now Blog, another good resource. We can extrapolate based on what’s going on today.

In reality, we probably need to undertake a combination of all of these techniques. And just as importantly, we have to combine thinking about the future with a culture of experimentation. It’s experimenting that ensures that we are finding ideas that will actually work.

Our job is to invent the future, and to do that, first we have to formulate a good idea of what the future should be.

(ralf says:
It often also makes sense to look at 3 groups of people: 01 kids, and what they love to do - 02 most admired companies - like Apple, Google, Twitter - of the world, and where they are heading - 03 politicians, and what they are prohibiting. This will give you a multi-dimensional picture of the future.

You just have to be better than that.)

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

"Brands are no Longer the Destination - The Customer is!"

"Brands reluctant to do the hard work of defining what they stand for and integrating that within their organization, or brands that mistakes social technology as an end in itself rather than as tools to connect people emotionally, run the very real risk of becoming invisible and obsolete.

Put simply, brands must accept that they are no longer the destination. Their customer is.

...

Brands are facing a new competitive landscape in which self-definition, core values and purpose will increasingly define their ability to reach customers that only allow what is meaningful in their lives to pass through their filter."

Simon Mainwaring, What Google+ Means for Brands

Can't tell you often enough, that in this new world of maximized human individuality, independence, and impatience, you will have to Plug & Play to Win-Win!

See the mistake in the below picture? Think about it - and: Do not follow that route!

Via workman.

Daimler: Celebrating 1000 Years of Incremental Innovation

The Mercedes brand and Daimler corporation celebrate "125! years of innovation". But I judge those 125 years as 125 years of more or less INCREMENTAL innovation.

Why? Think about the invention of the engine and car itself: a breakthrough. But after that? 125 years later we still sit behind a wheel, behind a polluting engine, above 4 wheels. All automobile companies just changed (not even optimized) each oh so small bit of the original car. Still running on fossile fuel, killing people, polluting the environment, causing jams.

Of course, there is no great resemblance between the mother of all cars and its latest newborn.
But is that an achievement to be truly proud of? After 125 years? Heated side windows? A rear-drive camera (because today's cars are too bulky to be handled without these implants)?

Of course: Everybody is building the best car they ever have. But: What else? A poorer car every year? Come on!

And now think about the Mercedes A-Class, B-, C-, E-, S-, SL, SLK, G-, M-Class and Smart: Seeing all these models and strategies I do see more than 1000 YEARS OF INCREMENTAL INNOVATION.

After all these models, strategies, and years we still haven't transcended the car into mobility.

"They all do not answer the coming challenges of climate change, air pollution, traffic congestion in the world's metropolises.

They all do not deliver satisfying answers to human's new individuality, independence, and impatience."

We still haven't transcended ownership.

We still haven't transcended wheels and streets.

Still haven't transcended the human-driver concept (not even for cargo transportation).

Still haven't transcended petrol.

After 1000 years of development at Daimler. Innovation?

99,9% pure distraction. Advertising. Gimmicks and gadgets. No breakthrough concepts in 125 years, just fashion, incrementals, self-referentiality.

And now: "Mercedes A-Class - The pulse of a new generation!". Seems to be the Generation Golf, or? Hm.

Mercedes, Daimler, come on, there must be more! All you ingenious engineers, you visionary managers, all you board millionaires. Where is your leadership leading us? A Golf with no windows but all wheels?

What will you offer us in another 125 years?

Even Car Sharing, cleverly visionized, will change the history of the automobile much more than the bulk of all that 125year-long trail of incremental innovations.

What's about more courage, more change, more creativity, more true breakthroughs, more inspiration, more leadership!

More disruption, more relevance! More value!

More to be truly proud of!

Innovation: Where Dragons Live

(Note: Tim wrote "Are You Climbing Hills or Crossing Valleys?". I commented: "You will have to lead your people and your consumers across the valley to where dragons live". Tim liked that comment and we - more or less - agreed that I will elaborate on that.)

"Where Dragons live" lends itself from 'Here be dragons', which "is a phrase used to denote dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of the medieval practice of putting sea serpents and other mythological creatures in blank areas of maps".

Corporations, their inner cultures, their leadership and management will have to decide what they want to stand for: being cowards not daring to travel uncharted lands, not daring to discover new horizons, not daring to transcend the edge of their company plate ...

... or to embrace change, to conquer the unknown. To walk off the beaten track and create and innovate!

Will they create the future? Be curious and brave? Do they want to learn and develop? Challenge the existing game, change the rules, change the playing fields?

Will corporations, their inner cultures, their leadership and management, brands, and marketers outgrow themselves, strive for excellence, and inspire others to follow?

Will they search for new business models - instead of hiding on common ground? Will they disrupt their category landscape? Will they understand their customers and anticipate their new individuality, independence, and impatience? Will they lead?

Will they become the heroes of future success stories? Will they be known for being brave pioneers creating new markets?

Will they be known for proving that there are no dragons? That the dragons solely exist in our minds and stories? And that these stories are told by market leaders to keep young adventurers, inventors, and challengers of the status quo off their own back?

You all should become heroes, brave men and women, fighting establishment's intolerance, arrogance, and ignorance! Do not believe the stories the old are telling you.

You all should push your individual limits, borders, limitations each and every day. Stop making sense! Beat your inner dragons! Lead us to the land of future riches - mental and material! Follow your intuition, your heart, your curiosity!