Innovation – From some Boozy Guys

Booz Allen Hamilton (the Boozy Guys), put together some choice words on the need for innovation in media. They focus on the biggest media companies (because that’s where they make the coin), but there are some key points that need to be echoed for LoMediaCo’s.

“Booz Allen’s recent study of the most successful innovators across all innovation strategies found that companies that directly engaged their customer base and closely tied their innovation strategy to overall corporate strategy had more than twice the return on assests and more than triple the growth in operating income achieved by survey respondents that didn’t do those things.”

A critical component in a robust innovation engine is”having an ideation process that incorporates multiple sources and functions, encouraging experimentation and mining the entire organization to fill the innovation pipeline.” Another is “a consistent, structured gating process for new and existing projects that considers economic value and strategic fit with the rest of the portfolio.” Also, “an open innovation approach that creates value by accessing a broader network of relationships with distributors, retailers, and customers.” And finally, “a separate innovation function inside the organization to give the strategic development of new products and services more attention and breathing room and free it from the demands of daily firefighting.”

How right they are. We’ve been implementing these core concepts in our innovation management system and were both pleased and irritated to find similar concepts on the interwebs. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a content crawler that goes out to the web to see if anyone has posted similar ideas to the ones you’re working on? Hopefully we can build something that does that, as well.

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NIH (Not Invented Here)

It is an interesting concept I learned about from this article at the New York Times site:

“Because great new technologies are coming from people who want to do their own thing, and won’t necessarily work for someone else, acquisition may be the only way for a large company to get them,” says Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at Hummer Winblad, the venture capital firm in San Francisco.

It’s kind of what we’re trying to figure out here with wedia too. How can we help build a community around media which will allow for companies and individuals to help one another – yet at the same time, provide enough space for innovation to happen.

Semantic Web for All

Source: WikipediaI’m ready for the semantic web. I want to write a blog post (such as this), have a crawler understand what I’m writing about, and go fetch relevant content from anywhere on the web for me to automatically include in my post. The waiting time for such a thing may be years, however, and I’ve resigned myself to that fact.

And then, a bolt of lightening from TechCrunch and my dream becomes reality. There’s a little company called Zemanta that launched in Alpha today, and this blog post will be my first foray into the semantic web. As I type, Zemanta is finding pics and articles that it deems relevant and useful to my subject. All of the pics and links you see scattered about took me one click to add from my new Zemanta plug-in for WordPress. I’m truly psyched.

Check back for further thoughts on this boss piece of Web 3.0.

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Social Networking! (as cool as hypertext)

1993: Hypertext is so boss. It’s like, I’m here, reading an article, and then I click on some blue text and all of a sudden I’m somewhere else reading related content. I gotsta get into the hypertext space and make some benjamins.

2008: Social networking is so sweet. It’s like, I upload my contacts to facebook, and then I have a window into all my friends lives. I gotsta get into the social networking space and make some cash money.

Yes, there are myriad differences between the rise of hypertext and social networking. The point is that they are both merely functions of the internet. No one gets excited about hypertext these days, and no one will get excited about social networking in a few years. It will just be a seamless part of the web experience and most likely not make anybody much money.

When everything becomes social online and off, without the need to be tied to a destination website, what’s the next step? What’s the next piece of functionality that will add value to everything we already can do today? I hope it helps me make decisions. I want to be at a bookstore, text my social aggregator to query all my friends’ uploaded recommendations/likes/blogs/amazon-purchases, and get back a graph of which mystery novels are recommended the most, which the most passionately, and slice the data based on who I trust the most. Now…what to call this function? Instant Asynchronous Social Knowledge (I-ASK)? Idea Nugget Mining (I-NuM)? Freaky Fast Friend Function (ffff)?

Many thanks to the good Brits over at the Economist for writing a great article about Online Social Networks called “Everywhere and nowhere” in the March 19th issue. I’d copy the full link if it wasn’t behind the pay-wall. It sure did start the brain juices flowing.

Hello Ya’ll

Defining this whole Wedia concept could get pretty messy. In fact, if it does get defined, I’m gonna go ahead and say it loses its fun relevance. Do people have trouble defining what a blog or wiki is? Doubtful. That’s what makes blogs and wikis super-awesome tools, but not stay-awake-at-night concepts.

In the name of fun and new ideas and a pinch of innovation, we’re gonna start drawing some fuzzy lines around the Wedia concept. We’ll keep it up as long as we can redraw/scratchout/extend the lines around Wedia. A huge bonus is that there are a bunch of on-fire people out there talking about this stuff already. We’ll definitely draw on your blog-pearls, and hopefully give you a reason to draw on ours.

And now, the first gauntlet gets laid down (which implies that there are gauntlets to come). If Tom and Nick can get 10 decent posts up by April 3rd, our benevolent boss is gonna buy us a round of beers. Because yes, we’re young and eager enough to take that as an incentive.

Bang.