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Today we published my first Forrester Research report on Marketing Innovation – Culture Is Key To Marketing Innovation Velocity (client access required). This is the first report in a series I will be writing on marketing innovation culture, innovation labs and partnering to accelerate marketing innovation velocity.

Marketing innovation in the age of digital disruption, perpetually connected customers and the customer lifecycle is hard and getting harder. What separates the marketers that are leading their organizations to accelerate marketing innovation velocity is the organizational culture they have created. This report discusses the four marketing innovation cultures including: risk averse, pragmatist, experimenters and customer obsessed. We also align the cultures based on whether they are internally or externally oriented or highly focused versus highly flexible. For example, a customer obsessed culture is more flexible and externally oriented in how it innovates and markets to its customers. Here is the marketing innovation cultures matrix…

[Click on the link to read the rest of this post.]

In two short posts I have extracted a couple of strands of thought that might provide us some pauses in our thinking of where innovation might be heading for its consequences and implications and what this might mean for each of us. This is the first.

Evidence is all around us, that there are changing innovation patterns, more evolutionary than radical, taking place. There are new forms of innovation that are offering novel emerging concepts, ideas and strategies of how innovation is becoming organized or possibly will be.

Due to the enormous acceleration of innovation, companies have focused far more on the trend to “over-engineer” their products in order to stay that little bit more competitive. They have often tended to lock into incremental improvements and thereby have been losing track of their main objectives: to be able to reap the benefits of their innovativeness and to meet their customers’ real needs. We are falling short of transforming through innovation.

A Foresight Project on Innovation

A report, undertaken between 2009 and 2112 and covering 144 pages, has been coordinating views on innovation and its possible future direction. This was funded by the EU FP7 on a foresight project on the future of innovation (INFU). It can be explored under the web page www.innovation-futures.org

Our first ‘pause’ is the seven dimensions of change for us to manage…

[Excerpt, click on the link to read the rest of this post.]

A recent early morning hike in Malibu, California, led me to a beach, where I sat on a rock and watched surfers. I marveled at these courageous men and women who woke before dawn, endured freezing water, paddled through barreling waves, and even risked shark attacks, all for the sake of, maybe, catching an epic ride.

After about 15 minutes, it was easy to tell the surfers apart by their style of surfing, their handling of the board, their skill, and their playfulness.

What really struck me though, was what they had in common. No matter how good, how experienced, how graceful they were on the wave, every surfer ended their ride in precisely the same way: By falling.

Some had fun with their fall, while others tried desperately to avoid it. And not all falls were failures — some fell into the water only when their wave fizzled and their ride ended.

But here’s what I found most interesting: The only difference between a failure and a fizzle was the element of surprise. In all cases, the surfer ends up in the water. There’s no other possible way to wrap up a ride.

That got me thinking: What if we all lived life like a surfer on a wave?

The answer that kept coming to me was that we would take more risks.

[Excerpt, click on the link to read the rest of this post.]

The past decade was all about the BRICs, the massive economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, which kicked off at the beginning of the new century, boomed and are now slowing like the rest of the developed world. Taking their place is a new group of fast-rising economies promising businesses outsized returns.

The next decade could belong to the CIVETS – Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa – whose rising middle class, young populations and rapid growth rates make the BRICs look dull in comparison.

“The BRICs are yesterday’s news,” said Professor Jerry Haar, director of the Pino Global Entrepreneurship Center at Florida International University in Miami. Hardly emerging economies anymore – China is the world’s second largest economy and Brazil will take seventh place this year – that their pace would slow down was inevitable.

Now more connected by trade to the developed economies, the BRICs are feeling the same slowdown effects as the developed economies. And, in the case of China and Brazil, they are also wrestling with the strains of their rapid ascensions. Real estate bubbles, currency control issues and hyper-wage inflation are sending global companies elsewhere for growth.

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You’ve read about and admired them, maybe met some of them. You’ve certainly benefited from their work: the growing elite of global businesspeople who are helping to define today’s international commerce. They are creating immense value for their companies and themselves—and, in many cases, making the world a better place.

The group includes top business leaders such as Carlos Ghosn, the Brazilian-Lebanese-French CEO of Japanese automaker Nissan; Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak, a UK-educated Bangladeshi who has worked in the United States for nearly 20 years; and Bob Dudley, the first American CEO of the British energy company BP. It also extends to lesser-known yet increasingly influential managers such as Saad Abdul-Latif, the CEO of PepsiCo’s Asia, Middle East, and Africa division, and Lalit Ahuja, who facilitated American retailer Target’s establishment of a second headquarters in India.

Most of these leaders have extensive international experience, speak multiple languages, and can tap into worldwide professional networks. But what really defines them is their ability to create value by helping their organizations adopt a global perspective. And thanks to the dramatic growth of international business in recent years, they are in high demand. During the past three decades, the value of exports across the world has increased from $2 trillion to $18 trillion, and half of them now come from emerging economies. In turn, the number of people working outside their company headquarters in foreign subsidiaries has rocketed from 25 million to more than 81 million, including notable shifts in the C-suite. As a consequence, 76% of executives surveyed by the United Nations Global Compact say that it’s important for companies to develop global leaders.

[Excerpt, click on the link to read the rest of this post.]

How is it that if no one is for these things, and everyone is against them, these problems continue?”

The 10th Annual Skoll World Forum, which brought together several hundred of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs to Oxford, has just wrapped for another year. The Forum serves as a useful barometer for how the climate of social enterprise is changing.

When it launched in 2004, it was all about celebrating the unknown social entrepreneurs, helping give them global recognition and credibility, and a platform to engage with policy leaders and large corporations.

In that task, it has succeeded brilliantly — over the past decade, social enterprise has become mainstream. Jeff Skoll picks out the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus in 2006 as a watershed moment, followed equally significantly in the following year by the award to Al Gore.

So 10 years in, what’s the current thinking? What new big idea now dominates the agenda and concerns of the Forum participants? And where do they think this field is going?

[Excerpt, click on the link to read the rest of this article.]

Designing and providing a service for a community is complicated and challenging: making sure you are providing what is actually needed, and not what you think is needed, can be a bit of a balancing act. For made in the Lower East Side (miLES), a project that helps bring new opportunities to vacant storefronts in a Manhattan neighborhood, this was even more of a challenge. Very few of the team actually lived in the Lower East Side.

miLES started in early 2012 when several participants, led by Eric Ho, joined forces after an openIDEO challenge to turn their ideas into a pilot-able project. The Lower East Side was traditionally an immigrant, working-class neighborhood and has drastically changed in the recent years. Even through it is a very “up-and-coming” and quickly gentrifying neighborhood, there are still over 200 vacant or unused lots and storefronts. miLES saw this as an opportunity to turn these spaces into vibrant community hubs, versus the traditional path of a new bar or restaurant.

TYTHEdesign joined miLES in early summer 2012 as the community engagement partner. Since none of us were from the hood, we wanted to be careful not to carry our team and personal assumptions through the whole project. As the business model and data research was happening, TYTHEdesign and a series of volunteers engaged in activities to understand the pulse and needs of the community, to help the community become engaged in both the learning, brainstorming and prototyping process, and to help miLES start a dialog.

[Excerpt, click on the link to read the rest of this post, and to follow the project links.]