Frederic Martin's List: Innovation

• How Can Web Tech Help Enterprises with Innovation Management?
• Three management techniques have withstood the test of time:
• Measure innovation. This is based on the adage that you can only manage what you measure. The most effective measurement is the percentage of revenue generated from recently created products.
• The BCG Matrix. This quadrant helps define the areas where you should be seeking innovation.
• The 20% free time for employees to spend on any project they like. This enables "off-the-wall" ideas to percolate without getting strangled at birth by management. Google made this famous recently, but it was originally pioneered by 3M. Here is a good review of the technique.
• Social media might enable a third wave of innovation management:
• 1.0 = Internal R&D departments. Give big budgets to bright people and tell them to invent. Bell Labs was the archetype of this model.
• 2.0 = Acquisition-led. This assumes you cannot innovate internally, that start-ups will build the new stuff, and you have to acquire the ones that succeed.
• But the track is littered with failures. Integrating products is relatively easy. Integrating cultures and retaining the passion of entrepreneurs is really, really hard.
• 3.0 = Leveraging social media. The potential exists to get the best of both the 1.0 and 2.0 worlds. The 1.0 internal R&D labs did not suffer integration issues but usually missed the big innovation opportunities that were achieved by acquiring start-ups. Social media offers the alluring possibility of harnessing outside innovation without the integration issues.
• Crowdsourcing has been around for a while. Josh Catone wrote a good round-up of companies leveraging it back in May 2008.
• Fundamentally, the crowdsourcing model depends on the motivation of the crowd to contribute. We have seen four main types of incentives:
• • Cash prizes. One of the pioneers of this, Innocentive, offers cash prizes. This clearly works.
• • Equity in start-ups (aka "Cash in future, maybe"). Many people have tried this and most have failed. Ideas without teams to execute are not of much value. It is just too woolly. These models bloom briefly at the end of start-up booms and die as soon as conditions turn harsh.
• Visibility. These competitions that beckon contributors to find the right answer and get their name in lights can either work or be exploitive. It depends a lot on the execution. The visibility can lead to more business for the contributor (it's free advertising that comes from using one's smarts rather than cash), and it has ego gratification as a bonus.
• Love. The rationale here is that if you love your country, community, school, or cause, you will donate time willingly. Entrepreneurs who cynically tap this motivation for profit are soon exposed.
• Innocentive is a pioneer in crowdsourcing. It started in 2001 and was made famous in Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (a great book, a must read that you'll find yourself referring to repeatedly).
• Brightidea is also working with big companies that want to turbo-charge their "suggestion box" and get some real value from it.
• Brightidea aims to help companies process and filter this flood of ideas so that they get the context needed to implement them.
• This seems like a valuable service-based business with a neat web front end to facilitate the idea flow. The company boasts some big clients, "including Cisco, Emerson, Bristol Myers Squibb, Bosch, ING Financial, and the U.S. Department of Defense."
• President Obama (it sure feels good to write that) is serious about changing America, and he is bringing his experience as a community organizer to Change.Gov, using all that the web has to offer. If you have not participated yet, try it now.

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• Mobile marketing's three best bets
• Image recognition
• App stores
• Live video

• My favorite mobile toys

   
   
  • App store: The Palm Pre
   
  • Image recognition: The SnapTell app for the iPhone
   
  • Live broadcast: Qik app

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• What marketers should watch in gaming

• The power of the branded app
• Apps must add value
• Mobile apps are king
• Look to the cloud
• Widgets: Viral ad units
• Homepage apps

• My favorite desktop toys

   
   
  • WriteRoom. It blacks out your computer screen to make it look like an old word processor -- great for inspiration and productivity.
   
  • OpenPandora. This streams Pandora without consuming browser memory and also syncs songs to your last.fm account.
   
  • Cooliris. Though we wish this worked better, I love the concept of turning your browser into a 3D cinematic experience.

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• The relationship era
• Businesses and brands are acknowledging that relationships with customers are changing -- welcome to the relationship era. But how do businesses adapt when the concept of a consumer dialogue has been a historically foreign concept? By embracing social media.
• Listen
• Engage
• Share
• Own up when you've messed up
• Be generous
• Be fun and interesting

• My favorite social toys

   
   
  • Social browsing. Socialbrowse is a Firefox add-on that lets you share and discuss any web page.
   
  • Webreader. Webreader is great for multi-taskers who want to listen to blogs instead of reading them (speech enables blogs).
   
  • Qikcom. Qikcom allows you to share and connect with colleagues.

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• Influence of mobile
• The influence of mobile devices and portable content will have a profound effect on video consumption and advertising models.
• Mobile devices are poised to be a key distribution channel for video content and ads in the future.
• While the U.S. is currently seeing around 5 percent mobile video usage, in Japan about 10 percent of mobile subscribers use their devices for video.
• Even as it takes time for mobile video consumption to catch up in the U.S., mobile participation is now a feature of many television shows and increasingly acts as a measureable call to action for television advertisements.
• Marketers have no choice but to draw mobile into their television and video ecosystems.

• Our favorite video toys

   
   
  • Boxee
   
  • Amazon Video on Demand. We love its search capabilities and instant downloads to TiVo.
   
  • Chumby's video widget collection. Play video clips in the kitchen over breakfast to catch up on the day's news.

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