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.
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(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?
Continue reading "[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle > "Eight Business Models, and Why They’re Important"" »
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(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 reason large parts of the corporate Internet is boring, difficult and of little direct use / effect is because we are unnecessarily complicating it. The Internet should be one thing: simple.
.
Let me demonstrate with a couple of examples how even minute tasks get unnecessarily complicated online.
Example A:
Comoyo is an Internet based content service. The first thing that happens as I fill in the form is that it refuses the password that I use on 95% of all my Internet accounts. Why would you do that? Why would you start of by inviting people to a service they don’t know what is, offer them a log in and the first thing you do is just crash the whole process? If the system is to complex then redesign the system. We are putting to much of the responsibility on to people, instead of IT.
Example B:
This is the beta version of my Internet bank, the picture is from a sneak preview they offered their customers. Now, I have a bank because I need help doing bank-things. Most often (95% of the time) this means checking my account or paying some bills. The best thing the bank can do is offer me a service that makes banking better. But they don’t. Approximately 15% of the interface is spent on banking, the rest of it is navigation, CRM or a media platform that wants to sell me stuff I don’t need. They give me everything except the actual banking service that I should be demanding (people are just to polite and don’t know that their experiences are being robbed online. In the words of Richard Saul Wurman, the creator of TED: “I would have designed a much better Google interface, it’s not difficult.”).
Now, the reason the Internet isn’t simple, is because of technology. We are treating online as something complicated, something that doesn’t work, something we don’t understand. – And my question is: how much do we really need to understand?
Take a look at other pieces of technology: bread, asphalt, language, bicycle, chairs, door knobs. Now do you think about these things as technology? They work and they are, no questions asked. But this is not the case with the Internet, why?
Understanding the nuts and bolts of the Internet is as important to a business as understanding the complexities of the mechanics that goes on inside the door when we twist the door nob.
Unfortunately the fog of technology diffuses the process of building something meaningful by trivializing the discussions and spending to much time focusing on irrelevant details. When we think of the Internet we are not thinking business models, identity and brand value. We are thinking users (what is a user?), HTML5, responsive design (why would you offer the same service in every situation?), apps or clicks.
The Internet is fascinatingly simple, if we just stop referencing it as technology and start thinking of it as a loaf of bread – because our customers already are.
(ralf says:
All those gurus out there are very deep into the technologies and secrets of the internet. But they cannot transcend the easiest mechanics of it.
To the opposite of my father I never wanted to understand a radio, a television set or loudspeakers. And he was limited by that understanding. He always told me that small speakers cannot - due to the laws of physics - create deep sounds. But they can these days. I showed him. He said: No they can't. They just sound like they can.
We are in the very early stages of the web. We have to get it out of our way. We have to understand that it is not important to understand it. We do not have to understand oxygen to understand that we have to breath. We even do not have to understand that we have to breath. We just do.
We just have to take care of the web's independence, its neutrality, and ubiquity. We must take care that politicians do not sell it to corporations like they did with our water systems and resources ... as simple as that.
The more simple a medium (in McLuhan's sense) is the more precious it will be for us and our future.)
Helge works as a Planner for SDG, helping brands and organizations discover WHY they are valuable in consumers lives, and HOW they can create deliberate value on the arenas and inside the interfaces where they connect with them. Twitter: @congbo
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"Congress is considering two well-intentioned but deeply flawed bills, the PROTECT-IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
As written, they would betray more than a decade of US policy and advocacy of Internet freedom by establishing a censorship system using the same domain blacklisting technologies pioneered by China and Iran." - tumblr
"Tumblr just put up this site warning people about the dangers of PROTECT-IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Read up, kids. This is important." - shortformblog
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(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:
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(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?
Continue reading "[L/M NET] Helge Tenno > The Game Changer: Presence & Proof" »
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Once in a while you stumble upon another Apple. There will for some years be no other Steve Jobs - but there are some Apples out there.
Harley Davidson is one of them - even if you did not see them as such in the first place. But ask just one Harley fan!
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(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)
Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act in innovation.
If this is the case, how do we get better at it?
I was being interviewed in my office by a student yesterday for a project that she’s doing. As we talked, she kept looking at my bookshelves, with an increasingly confused look on her face. Finally, she said “this is off-topic, but what exactly do you study?” She had stumbled across one of my strategies for connecting ideas creatively – reading very widely.
Here is how I approached this issue in an earlier post:
A while back my PhD student Sam and I were talking, and he asked me about my RSS feed. His question was something along the lines of ‘what blogs would I have to read if I wanted to be able to make the connections that you do on your blog?’ As we talked, I realised that it didn’t matter if I gave anyone else my exact RSS feed, they wouldn’t be able to replicate my blog.
The reason for this is that the articles in my RSS feed that trigger ideas are completely dependent upon my unique set of experiences, including all of the things that I’ve read and done previously. It reminds me of the idea of psycheography that was developed by Guy Debord and The Situationists (it should be noted that they would be horrified at the use of these ideas in a context that has anything to do with business, but I guess this is part of building novel connections between ideas!).
Consider this map of Paris:
It shows the sections of the city used by a student over a period of several weeks. There are two important points to think about this with this. First, each person’s map of the city they live in will be unique. My version of Brisbane will by fundamentally different from that of everyone else that lives here. The same is true for all cities. Second, most people use only a very small percentage of the city in which they live. The student’s version of Paris is actually quite a small amount of the overall city.
The Situationists’ response to this was the dérive:
One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
This might seem a bit abstract, but there are some important implications here for innovation, including:
All of this is probably just a way to rephrase what John was saying when he was telling us to Be a Hedgefox!
The bottom line is this – to increase the quality of our innovative ideas, we have to figure out a way to make novel creative connections between ideas. To do this, we have to find a way to access ideas outside of our normal patterns of thinking. We have to make our own map.
(ralf says:
The benefits of having an own map is even harder to explain to people during these days of navigational systems and nanny states around the world.
Yes, think about that!
The benefits of having an own map lie at the intersection of having a distinctive vision and being lost in an uncertain world while at the same time knowing how to handle a map, a plan, a compass!
Your own map gives you a feeling of mastering the landscape, the nature, culture, and future of your whereabouts and whatabouts.
Not being forced to a navigational system (ie. processes, structures, regulations, limitations) gives you individuality and independence, gives you serendipity!
Enjoy 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
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“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"
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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.
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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.
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More than ever you will have to start thinking outside the box - outside the facebook box that is! Facebook is a trap.
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.
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(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.
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"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!
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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!
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(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!
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(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 just finished listening to my version of the new album by Kaiser Chiefs, The Future is Medieval, and I have to say that I’m pretty happy with it.
You may well ask what makes it my version?
The thing that makes it mine is that I picked the 10 songs to go on it, I picked the order they’d go in, and I made the artwork. And I guess I’m promoting it now too, even though what I’m really interested in is the business model.
Here is how Mike Masnick describes the idea:
…there are two key things that the band is doing with this digital (and it’s only digital) release:
- Let fans create a “custom” album with custom artwork. The band is effectively releasing 20 songs, and users get to pick which 10 they want, and put them in any order they want — and then they get a custom piece of album artwork, based on the choices. The website is fun to play around with as well.
- Then, once you’ve bought the album, you also get a “fan page” for the unique album that you created, and if you drive others to that page and they buy the copy of the album that you created, you get £1 (the full album costs £7.50).
There are some other little features as well, but those are the two big ones. It’s definitely an interesting idea, and I’ll be curious to see how it goes.
I’m pretty curious to see how it will work too. Masnick has some reservations about the choices that they’ve made – but it illustrates an important point. When you face a turbulent environment, as record labels certainly do at the moment, then you have to experiment with new business models to find out what works.
This is an interesting experiment.
Here is what singer Ricky Wilson had to say about it in an email to The Lefsetz Letter:
We’re quite excited about this. Why not make an album yourself? We wanted to reward the fans for being our fans and thought this could be nice.
We just sold all our tickets for our first two gigs exclusively on our facebook page, which worked a treat and we’re going to be getting fans to use Facebook polls to help us pick set-lists and stuff. God knows if it’ll work.
We’ve used a load of our own money to hire some really clever people to build the site and market it so we’re hopeful.
This definitely isn’t some sort of two-fingers-to-the-system thing. In fact our label Fiction have been very supportive.
It’s not supposed to be a massive statement to the world or a fight against anything. It was just fun and we needed that to be honest.
So what’s different from a business model standpoint? A few things.
By getting people involved it changes the value proposition pretty significantly. If you take an hour to put together your own version of the CD, then you’re likely to feel pretty invested in it. In my case, that worked pretty well because even though I love and have bought a couple of Kaiser Chiefs songs, this is the first full CD of theirs that I’ve ever gotten. Marion Gibbon has a good analysis of some of the issues here as well.
The value network is different too, with fans promoting the record (although here is a critique from Dan Catt of that part of the scheme who suggests that this isn’t necessarily the best idea in the whole experiment – something that I agree with).
It’s also interesting to see what hasn’t changed – the value chain that produced the record is pretty standard. The band was supported by their label to go into the studio to make the music, and all the rest of the process right up to distribution is pretty standard. So it’s not a full DIY value chain like Kristin Hersh is using.
I’ve got no idea if this will work or not. But in a sense it doesn’t matter, because once it’s done, we’ll know something about this type of approach. And other bands and labels can try it themselves, or come up with a way to make this business model better.
The one thing that I do know is that if your business model is in trouble, trying out ideas that involve your customers more deeply in the process of creating things is probably smarter than suing them.
That was the end of the regular post, but here is where I’ll tell you a bit more about my version of the album. Carl Wilkinson has a good discussion of the ideas behind the album, whether or not it is a good idea for artists to give up control over track sequences, and the story behind his version of the album in this story at the Financial Times. Strangely, his first three tracks are identical to mine, even though I’m pretty sure we used a different method for picking songs.
In looking at this and a few other posts about the records, I think I messed up the artwork on mine. In any case, if you’d like to see the artwork, or check out my song choices, you can go here:
I’m pretty sure that the overlap between people reading this blog and Kaiser Chief fans is pretty small:
If you’re interested in hearing some of the music from the record, this is the first single Little Shocks:
If all this grabs your interest, you should check out the new record. But whatever you do, don’t buy my version – make your own!
(ralf says:
"When you face a turbulent environment, as record labels certainly do at the moment, then you have to experiment with new business models to find out what works", Tim writes above.
I have to add, just to make that shure: If you do think these times are not turbulent, and you are not overwhelmed by that, you are not moving fast enough! Now you have a problem! You do not seem to understand what people's new individuality, independence, and impatience really do imply for brands, businesses, and their success (where I might repeat myself).
The music industry, like car, publishing and energy industries are the best examples for coming late and never beginning to realize 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
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