Apr 29, 2010 | Alliance management, Communication, Demand chains, Social Media, Strategy
Democratising knowledge, isn’t this a lovely term! I have heard it used on a number of occasions recently, and it came up again in an extraordinary TED presentation by Stephen Wolfram .
In just two words it nails the complex changes happening in numerous ways in our lives. Knowledge used to be power, now it is freely available, it is simply a tool, and the ones who use it best will win, rather than in the past, where the holder of the knowledge had a huge advantage.
Amongst all the other things that have changed, is the potential to turn simple supply chains that pump product into a channel driven only by capacity, into demand chains that respond backwards to demand signals from the customer.
This opportunity for change driven by a combination of the communication tools on the net, and the ability to assemble and analyse the drivers of demand in your particular market offers huge potential for innovation, efficiency, and differentiation based on the capabilities of those in the chain.
Apr 28, 2010 | Communication, Management, Social Media
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorised that the maximum number of people any individual could maintain a relationship with was 150, which has become known as Dunbar’s number. It reflects the cognitive maximum for someone to know everyone in a group, and to be aware of the relationships between them all.
Social media has led to people into having many “friends” sometimes thousands, but in the human sense, they do not have a relationship, it is something different, for which I suspect we need a new term.
Human beings are social animals, and no matter how valuable our digital networks are to us, they are no substitute for the human interactions that define us, but are limited to around 150 individuals at any one time.
Apr 27, 2010 | Category, Customers, Innovation, Sales
Running a qualitative consumer research group recently, one of the participants surprised me with a metaphor that made great sense.
She said that the web had taught her to “forage”, her term, looking for stuff of interest, checking out the Sku’s available in a category far more widely than previously, when she had a modest “basket” of regulars, with a pecking order, and that did not change much from month to month. This reminded her of the behavior of the farm dogs she had as a kid, always looking for something to eat, in different places, and always nuzzling something new when it became available, and then deciding if it had any interest.
The implications are pretty clear. Experimentation within categories, and into adjacent categories may have been encouraged by the transfer of the “nuzzling” behavior we undertake every day as we cruise the web, looking for tit-bits of interest.
Sku numbers in supermarkets have exploded over the last 20 years, and I always thought it was just the drive for shelf presence and often minor differentiation in an effort to attract consumers that had driven it, but perhaps there is something more primal in our reaction to variety.
Apr 26, 2010 | Innovation
Successful innovation rarely comes from a formulaic approach where the marketing department has a brainstorm, prioritises the outcomes, then they progress through a “gated” process culminating in a launch.
Usually it comes from three sources:
- A sufficiently close relationship with customers that you can see their challenges and opportunities, and are able to assemble your capabilities to assist them to compete successfully.
- A deep understanding of the strategic and competitive environment in which your customer lives, and a willingness and ability to change the rules as a result of that understanding.
- The culture in your organisation supports the innovation process automatically, it has become part of the DNA of the organsiation.
These three factors are mutually supportive, but scoring 2/3 is simply not good enough for consistently superior performance.
Apr 24, 2010 | Innovation, Uncategorized
Another of the management paradoxes littered through this blog , and this one is counter to almost everything I have ever written.
In the context of true innovation, listening to customers exclusively leads you to adjusting, improving, repackaging what you currently have.
Real innovation is about inventing the future, and you cannot do it just by playing with the present.
The following challenge is if you are smart enough to invent the future you also have to be smart enough to recognize it when you see it.
Kodak did not see digital photography, but they invented it, IBM struggled to see that the PC would take over from big box computing, Microsoft did not see the web, until it had almost passed them, but Steve Jobs did see touch as the replacement for the mouse, which he originally saw as the devise to democratize personal computers.
