B is for Beta

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