Think Disruptively to Transform Your Business

“The old mantra, ‘differentiate or die,’ is no longer relevant,” Luke Williams (a BRITE ’11 speaker) claims in his recently published Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business. “The real mantra should be ‘differentiate all you want, but figure out a way to be the only one who does what you do, or die.’” Disrupt reflects Luke’s immense experience creating breakthrough solutions while working at frog design, one of the world’s leading innovation firms.  Luke has more than a decade of international strategy and design experience working with industry leaders like American Express, GE, Sony, Crocs, Virgin and Disney to develop new products, services and brands.

Disruptive thinking is “a way of thinking that turns consumer expectations upside down and takes an industry into its next generation.”  In his work with clients and as an Adjunct Professor of Innovation at NYU Stern School of Business, Luke provides a disruptive thinking framework that helps solve problems and create opportunities.

Reminiscent of our own Faculty Director Bernd Schmitt’s process of “killing sacred cows,” Luke details in an article for Mashable how to create disruptive hypothesis that smash your industry’s clichés to uncover innovative products and marketing strategies. In one example, he highlights Red Bull’s inversion of two standards in the soda category: that “soda is inexpensive” and that “soda tastes good.” Instead, “[Red Bull] placed absolutely no importance on taste, the product is double the price of Coca-Cola, and it dispensed with marketing aspirational images. The message was that Red Bull may not necessarily make you feel happy, but it’ll definitely give you a shot of energy when you need it.”

Hear Luke Williams speak at our BRITE ’11 conference (March 2-3, 2011). Register now!

BY MATTHEW QUINT

Business Models Based on Sharing

In 2009, Time Magazine named Robin Chase one of its 100 Most Influential People, thanks to her pioneering ideas on transportation, beginning with her successful founding of Zipcar.

Inspired by car-sharing models in Europe, Chase brought to life a “car rental by the hour” platform in the U.S. Through a simple usage proposition, word-of-mouth marketing, and great customer service, Zipcar has expanded enormously over its ten-year existence–eventually spurring similar offerings from the more established car rental companies.

In founding Zipcar, Chase was also driven by a desire to develop transportation business models that were more sustainable and ecologically balanced. So her next venture, GoLoco, is the first company to combine ridesharing, social networks, and easy payment to help reduce carbon emissions. She explains the importance of the concept to BusinessWeek,

I see GoLoco as an immediate solution. It means I don’t have to wait for the government to introduce carbon taxes or congestion charges, or put in smart development or light rail or transit. Today, with the infrastructure we have, we can do something which dramatically reduces costs and emissions.

To read more about this new idea and Chase’s views on transportation, cooperative capitalism, and technology, visit her blog.

To hear Robin Chase speak at BRITE ’10, register now.

BY MATTHEW QUINT

Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch

In talking with one of his clients about the barriers to open innovation within an organization, Dwayne Spradlin, CEO and President of InnoCentive, received a wonderfully insightful quote: “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”

As Spradlin told BusinessWeek (podcast), the right culture is essential to making open innovation work. When leadership supports it from the top, Spradlin believes that “people will be extraordinary.” If middle-management receives the necessary permission to be creative and come up with new ideas, they will be the ones who drive open innovation.

Founded in 2001, InnoCentive works with a wide range of businesses to develop incentive-based innovation challenges. Solutions are found by a community of problem solvers spread all around the world. From running these challenges and working with clients, Spradlin offers the following advice for organizations looking to tap the power of an open innovation system:

• Make sure that you create an innovation challenge only for tasks that you intend to move forward on.
• Ask the right question–think of a specific “what if” question that might result in a business advancement, rather than just posing general business problems.
• Harness a group of “problem facilitators” with the skills to develop the right questions and evaluate the solutions to your innovation challenges. This will improve the efficiency of the rest of your company when it moves forward with innovative ideas.

To hear Dwayne Spradlin speak at BRITE ’10, register now.

BY MATTHEW QUINT

Innovation in Curation

For decades, curating a show in a museum meant putting the works of art together and displaying them (for example, hanging the paintings on the wall with some consideration on where they should hang and perhaps putting some introductory note at the beginning of the show, written in “high brow” art-history lingo). There are still too many shows like that. But the really good ones today are quite different.

Like the brilliant show on Spanish Painting & Sculpture 1600-1700 in the National Gallery in London, which I attended yesterday. The show is titled “The Sacred Made Real.” For innovation in curation starts with the name: “Spanish Painting …” is the subtitle; the “Sacred Made Real” is the main title, providing a theme for watching the show. The audio guide, rather “audio program,” is superbly done and really enriches the experience. It is easy to use, includes interviews with the curator and others; allows you to play music of the time, and so on. What else is on? Not only the usual lunchtime talks but also “The Making of a Spanish Polychrome Sculpture,” which reveals the technical process in creating such sculptures.

All of this is experiential and customer oriented. That’s why I ask my EMBA students in the Munich program to go to the museums there. As museums have adopted a customer orientation and are wiping off the old dust, managers can learn a few lessons from them about how to innovate in a business in which there had been little change for too long.

BY SCHMITT

This post originally posted by Schmitt on the MeetSCHMITT blog at:
http://www.meetschmitt.com

Crowdsourcing in Action: One Step to Build a Company

There is growing evidence that a company can strengthen its brand by listening to customers and even sourcing business ideas from the crowd. But just what does such an effort look like in action?

Entrepreneur Aaron Cohen used his speaking slot at the BRITE ’09 conference to conduct a live crowdsourcing experiment with the attendees. Cohen described the basic concept and unique assets behind a new company he was about to lead, AnyClip.com, and then sought out suggestions that might turn these raw materials into a breakout media brand. Here is a video of this “crowdsourcing in action.”

Cohen assumed the role of CEO shortly after BRITE, and AnyClip is now moving forward along some of the tracks discussed during the conference. AnyClip (now in beta launch) lets users find, watch and share short clips of their favorite movie scenes online, and it has already secured the rights to host films from most of the major Hollywood studios. The company won rave reviews for its recent demo at the TechCrunch50 competition, walking away with the coveted Audience Award.

One of the key ideas in Cohen’s crowdsourcing discussion at BRITE was to open up the company’s film clip database to the software developer community — so that anyone can build new applications, services, and revenue streams based on AnyClip’s platform. Cohen discusses this strategy in a recent piece he wrote for The Business Insider, including the use of an “open API” (application program interface). Opening a new platform up to development by other entrepreneurs has been a critical part of the success of both Twitter and the iPhone App Store.

Open APIs are unique to technology brands. But, whatever industry you are in, there are ways to solicit ideas from your stakeholders and strengthen your brand through collaboration with your customers.

BY MATTHEW QUINT

This post originally posted by Matthew on the BRITE Conference blog at: http://www.briteblog.net