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Ideas, creativity and play

As I don't blog anymore these days, I've decided to post this great content from a firm I admire a lot. First, for those interested, you should that The Guardian in association with IDEO has launched Inspire and Innovate section on the Guardian. They focus on explaining why now is the time for creative thinking and innovation.

Then, at the 2008 Serious Play conference, IDEO’s Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play. He reminds us to “forget the adult behaviours that get in the way of ideas.” A great video to change the way you get to ideas.

• Explorations: Go for quantity
• Building: Think with your hands
• Role Play: Act it out

Management design flaws and radical remedies

MLab was founded by Gary Hamel and is designed to support research and experimentation around the future of management. At the inagural event the MLAb interviewed the attendees to hear about what radical remedies they might have for the future of management.

Each participant was asked to identify a key barrier that prevents organizations from being adaptable, innovative, or an inspiring place to work; and then to propose a potential solution. In the video clips, academics, venture capitalists, and CEOs identified the critical flaws of "management-as-usual" and posit innovative solutions.

Underlying music moment

I’m always amazed how small interactions can create such a level of happiness. That’s what happened to me last night when I discovered the Shazam application for iPhone.

Already an industry standard, Shazam fully integrates with and complements the iPhone's native environment, allowing you to seamlessly discover, buy and share tunes simply by holding your iPhone to music for just a few seconds.

The Shazam application enables you to tap into a vast database of nearly 5 million tracks giving instant satisfaction for those times when you want to know the tune that is playing, learn more about the artist, buy the song immediately - or simply add it to your playlist.

You can:

• Tag music: identify music anywhere - whether it's on the radio, TV, in a movie or in a store.
• Build your own soundtrack: see the list grow every time music is tagged.
• Get the music: go straight to iTunes to preview and buy.
• Music Videos: see related videos of the track on YouTube.
• Capture the moment: personalise the tag by taking a photo and adding it to 'My Tags'.
• Share the moment: send track details to friends via email.

Above is a demo of the product. Enjoy.

Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web

At the 2007 EG conference, Kevin Kelly shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what's coming in the next 5,000 days?

The Long Wow

Adaptive Path's Brandon Schauer and David Verba, recently gave a presentation on Subject To Change. It’s a good overview of the main points of their new book. "The way most organizations think and work on products and services isn't suited to the unpredictable world we live in. Instead, companies need new ways of thinking and working to adapt into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations who creates great products and services".

As David Armano pointed out: "The biggest challenge that today's marketers face is understanding how to overcome the obstacles that get in the way from creating user/customer/consumer experiences that people want to make part of their everyday lives."

I also wanted to share this slidecast, The long wow. This presentation lays out an experience-centric approach to fostering and creating loyalty by systematically impressing your customers again and again. The Long Wow challenges creators of customer experiences to plan across channels, time, and disciplines to identify a progression of seduceable moments.

For more on that topic, you can check Adaptive Path's blog.

Cannes 2008 : Total Collision

Here is the video from the presentation I did in Cannes a few weeks back. Based on the feedback received afterwards I believe we did a good job again. Please share any thoughts and point of view in comments below if you like, we are interested in opening a bit more of an industry wide debate about how to move things further around this - what we feel is an exciting - topic.

Open Innovation

I’ve always been interested in open innovation. If we are in the early days of collaboration in the agency world, I think that we should try to learn to work with others.

We all speak about UGC, social network, sharing and so forth but what do we do ourselves?  We work with the Internet everyday and are immersed in a world of widely distributed knowledge and don't use much of these advantages.

We don’t spend much time innovating but have a lot of clients. We cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license processes or inventions from other companies [that spend a lot of time experimenting but don’t have enough clients to take these innovations to market].

In Think Like a Venture Capitalist and Change the Marketing Model, Mark Kvamme said: “When it comes to the ways technology is changing the world, marketers would do well to think like venture capitalists: invest upfront in opportunities with potentially huge payouts and help new technology companies define novel ad models.”

I also wanted to share this presentation from Nokia about open innovation. I hope the case studies will get you excited about trying to open the way you work a little bit.

For more reading you can check:

• How Nokia Users Drive Innovation
• Innovation through Global Collaboration

Design thinking

I’ve recently come across this thought saying that “as marketers realise the power of digital, our industry is going from telling stories to designing experiences - experiences that deliver information, entertainment, and applications for online, mobile, or physical environments. Applications create utility and engagement that, when relevant, result in deeper brand experiences.”

If agencies are going to design experiences, then it might be the time for us to have a closer look at design thinking.

Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, recently wrote an interesting piece on Harvard business review on how thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes—and even strategy.

Here are key points on how to make design thinking part of the innovation drill.

• Begin at the beginning
• Take a human-centered approach
• Try early and often
• Seek outside help
• Blend big and small projects
• Budget to the pace of innovation
• Find talent any way you can
• Design for the cycle

Then you might be interested in seeing this video conference on the same topic that Tim Brown gave at MIT about innovation through design thinking.

The O2 memory project

About a month ago I was in Southbank to visit the O2 Memory Project, an installation by Jason Bruges Studio. The work explores the temporary nature of our digital memories, drawing on the theme of ‘nothing is lost’. The structure camera-captures panoramic moments in time and stores them within its digital memory bank. Inside, visitors can explore the stored history of the installation and interact with the displayed 360 degree images.

Simultaneously, the Memory Project has a significant online element. All the panoramic images taken are time-coded and instantly uploaded and can be viewed as ‘memory rings’ – unique 360 degree images that can be scrolled through. Lessrain wrote about the development.

“Over the years, physical diaries, photo albums and shoe boxes have kept our personal memories safe. A generation from now, printed matter might not exist. We are already relying on hard drives, websites and mobile phones to store our digital memories. Our lives will be downloaded as a matter of course for future generations to examine, adore or even ignore.”

For more see this great video from the BBC.