Category: Innovation Design

You Say Disruption, I say Revolution (for Greg Satell (https://twitter.com/Digitaltonto/)

“Disruption” has become a popular buzzword over the past five years. It’s been used to label the agressive shifts of free-market competition. These “disruptive” economic shifts have been around for centuries. They’re sometimes labeled as periods of innovation, sometimes they are truly revolutions. As these shifts have become more prevalent within our current era, the term “disruption” has reached heightened usage. In the past, pre-1950s, the impact of disruption would be spread over a generation or two. The “pain” of the disruption could be absorbed over a lifetime. This cycle of disruption and absorption has accelerated, exponentially, starting during the post-war economy of the 1950s.

As example, the ice barons of the 19^th century (http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/20311) withstood a “lifetime” disruption and absorption cycle. These barons, who shipped New England ice all over the world, did not invent electric refrigeration. The ice industry was disrupted by refrigeration. This harshest part of the disruption, the collapse of the ice industry as the primary source of non-electric refrigeration, took place over a “soft landing” period of 50 years. By the 1950s electric refrigeration was the norm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator).

Using the computer as an example of disruption we can witness, in slow motion, the increasing influence of ever-more-powerful computers starting in the early 70s up until the 90s with the adoption of the PC. Then the disruption accelerates with the rampant adoption of PCs all the way up to their recent offshoots (tablets, smart phones). In the 80’s we could expect a computer-related disruption every five years, now we expect a computer-related disruption within every six months.

The downside to these disruptions is the negative impact. The impact is typically unevenly spread within the population causing “winners” and “losers.” Some of the negative impact is obvious, but many aspects are inapparent, and often separated from the disruption. As example, the creators of email didn’t set out to negatively impact the US postal service. The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Schumpeter), in his writings from the 1940s, predicted this disruptive cycle of winners and losers. He labeled it “Creative Destruction” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction). He concluded these cycles would continue to accelerate until the forces of capitalism destroyed itself.

It is not the fault, and potentially not the intent, of the inventors who create disruptions to foresee the winner and losers. Nevertheless, all disruptions will, even if the goal is benign.

The pertinent insight from our era is how companies are adopting strategies that allow them to thrive within an economic environment of accelerated disruptions versus being negated by them. The next wave of entrepreneurs will ideally take this to the next level and figure out models that include reducing the negative impact caused by these disruptive innovations. This trend is seen within the organic food movement and LEED certification in architecture.

Companies, such as Apple, are brilliant students of Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction. Rather than allowing the external forces of competition to drive the disruption, they choose to disrupt themselves, regularly reinventing their products, both from a design and functionality perspective. This allows them to contradict Schumpeter’s prediction. They are thriving. This thriving through self-disruption is actually a 20^th century revolutionary theory. Marxists such as Trotsky and Mao deeply believed in the theory of “Permanent Revolution” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_revolution) as the only means to enable and accelerate innovation while also stabilizing the wider economy.

Companies such as Facebook or Twitter have also invented clever variations to the Apple-way to alleviate this disruption. They are disrupting themselves by adopting and absorbing user behavior into their services. This allows them to be part of the disruption versus being affected by it. Their nimbleness allows them to thrive.

In our era these disruptions are taking place on a national, if not a global scale. If business leaders seek to shift their enterprises and initiatives to both align to and shield themselves from the radical disruptions of our era they have to make radical changes to their operations and/or make radical changes to the macro-economic arena within which they function. We are in an accelerated disruptive era, calling it “revolutionary” or “innovative” are choices of nuanced phrasing to explain their aspirations to their constituents.

The rewards of our era are for those who can shift to align with disruption, to thrive off the positives while mitigating the negative effects. Those that can do both will be the successful benefactors of our era.

Chris Cornell is a musical genius. Yes, I was raised on the heavier music of the post-punk pre-Nirvana-breakthrough wave, and therefore have a preference for these tones, but what Chris Cornell has accomplished as a “Futurist” is extraordinary.

If you listen to Chris’s first popular band, Soundgarden, you might fight it off as “heavy metal.” If you listen carefully you realize the band is practicing the art of dissonance. Practicing, or at least being able to identify, dissonance is the anchor to being a Futurist. Each Soundgarden (and his solo stuff, and his time with Audioslave) record, performance, and song is an exercise of dissonance. He is weaving into the mainstream-songbook the external forces of marginalized sounds. Nearly of all of his songs, the structures, the chords, the vocal ranges, are built on dissonant chords that find moments of serene resolution, and then break back apart into dissonance.

There are many historical examples of weaving dissonance into the mainstream. Specifically related to Chris, is one that has been replicated since the birth of “print-making” and is now found in Instagram. Let’s use punk-rock bass playing as the pivot point.

Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols didn’t know how to play the bass. It didn’t matter. The band had a strong drummer and guitar player; both “professional” studio musicians. They were the forces of resolve… weaving Sid’s dissonance into the mainstream. This allowed Sid, and Johnny Rotten, to be the “punks” they are now famous for being. If you listen to Sid’s playing you realize that he can’t play, but what he did bring to the band is the historical print-making technique of, “over-biting,” or “foul-biting.”

Way back when, when people realized they could duplicate things, they relied on the printing press to be their duplication machine. They eagerly attempted to make things perfect. The key problem of early print techniques is it required the use of acids to burn the texts or images into the metal printing plates. When all went well, the ink would remain within the cracks, scratches, and acid-made lines in the plates. These plates were then used to press the ink into paper. But acid is volatile, and it would leak, run, and escape the lines the printmaker carefully laid. Somewhere along the way, dissonant printmakers found a beauty in the overrun of acid. They created techniques to make it happen on purpose. They were our culture’s early punk-rockers.

This overrun is called over-biting or foul-biting. It added a genuine quality to the prints; it added an unseen force, a “filter” to their images that was out of their control, but still exciting, and even beautiful to the eye. If you should browse through Instagram, you are made acutely aware that this dissonance trend is in full force. Thousands, if not millions, of images are struck with an over-bite layer to give them that “old school” quality. It’s as old as people making prints, any type of prints. And it is an obvious example of the weaving in of dissonance into the mainstream, or potentially the other way around. This specific “print” wave took around two hundred years to crest.

Back to music…Sid Vicious was the over-bitten plate. Chris Cornell is Instagram.

Through Chris’s songwriting and performance, he continues this over-bite tradition and elevates it to a genius level. Through following Chris’s career, as an exercise of dissonance, you could predict Instagram. The western culture is becoming more and more dissonant as the voices of difference become available on social networks. This effect is illustrated within the adoption of filters on Instagram.

Even so, dissonance works both ways. And if we look to Chris Cornell as the trailblazer of the dissonant wave, it seems the next step is to take the popular, resolutive sounds of our day and to weave them backwards into the force of dissonance. This is an unwinding, a drawing out of the dissonance from the popular and putting it back into the wave of change. Like a tornado pulling up the hot ground-air from the plains to power its might, the next wave will be a powerful change, a shift to the marginalized, a shift away from a one hegemonic force and into the facets of a multi-force web of cultures, people, and voices.

Case in point: Chris is currently on tour. On the news of Whitney Houston’s death, Chris learned one of her songs, overnight, but wove it through his dissonance filter. The outcome is still her song, some of his song, but ultimately a genius moment where a futurist listened deeply to his surroundings, found the resolutive force, and pulled it back into the roots of dissonance.

Chris Cornell, live, San Francisco, 2/16/12, “I will always love you”

http://www.youtube.com/user/concertkid2#p/a/u/1/vgFAq9Q8l8U

Super, freaking, genius.

Klout is the Sugar Cereal of Social Nutrition*

I like sugar cereal, I do. In my family home we were rarely allowed to have it. The rule was if sugar appeared as one of the first two ingredients on the box, then that cereal was unfit for our bodies. As soon as I was a grown up and had rented my own apartment, one of the first things I purchased, one of the first things I deserved, was to eat sugar cereals. Because I could, because they were delicious, because it was what all the ads I watched on TV and billboards and the radio said I should do. “4 out of 5 doctors who eat cereal say…” “100 Million people have Klout…”

Kellogg’s cereal was born from a sanitarium in 1877. It was a health-food. In 1909 Swiss physician Maximilian Bircher-Benner prescribed Muesli for his patients. Health food. Cocoa Puffs? Trix?

Modern day social-dietitians prescribe lots of tactics to increase your social health. Some are solidly nutritious, some are attractive AND nutritious, some are deliciously sweet, and vibrant, but are really just empty calories. Can you tell the difference? Tony the tiger says, “They’re great!”

Reading the Klout ingredients, it’s mostly sugar. I ignore the logic, I’m tempted by it. I reach for its colorful box, its game-like content scribed across its front. I sneak it late at night when no one is watching. I know its really not good for me, but its seductive. Its magical powers map to those puzzle holes in my brain, the receptors, that make me feel better. See, I have a score! And I can control it, I can manufacture my own destiny through a handful of activities that increases my value to…um…my impact on…to…other folks who check Klout scores? Community! That’s it. It increases my value and impact to a community of other people who value algorithmic scores as the indicator of value and impact to a community.

C’mon, the social space is so vast, so uncharted, so full of disruption and change, who can really deal with its unfathomable nature? I want, I require, the simple answer. Having to analyze people, messages, and behaviors is hard. I’d much rather just know their Klout score and call it a day’s work. Is that so wrong?

Listen, sometimes I need a crutch to lean on, a respite from thinking, a break from the healthy-body healthy-mind regime. We all do. I like sugar cereal, I also brush my teeth. In the meantime 19% of US children between the ages of 2 and 19 have untreated dental cavities. Children below the poverty line have a significantly higher rate of untreated cavities. In 2010, an estimated $108 billion was spent on dental services in the United States. In 2008, on average, 68.5% of US citizens visit the dentist each year (CT was the highest, Oklahoma was the lowest). That must be a good business to be in. Now only if we can take that model and layer it on everything else…

Oh Klout. There you sit on the shelf, burgeoning in your adoption. Social-dietitians professing your whole-body goodness while armies of social-dentists and social-rewardsmen hover at the door, waiting to provide the trinkets and salve for the eventual ailments. What to do? I’m torn between wellness and sweetness! I want to check my Klout score!

Nay, fly to Altars; there they’ll talk you dead;
For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.

—–
Untreated Dental Caries (Cavities) in Children Ages 2-19, United States
http://www.cdc.gov/Features/dsUntreatedCavitiesKids/

Adults aged 18+ who have visited a dentist or dental clinic in the past year
http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/nohss/ListV.asp?qkey=5&DataSet=2

An Essay on Criticism, by Alexander Pope
http://poetry.eserver.org/essay-on-criticism.html

*Social Nutrition is a TM of Jason Moriber

Five Applied Cultural Economics Ideas to Build the US Economy

1. Foster group-buying of health-care. One of the largest weights on grass-roots/start-up innovation is health insurance. Alleviate this burden and new businesses and opportunities will spark. Similar to the model currently used by The Freelancers Union, allow for groups of friends, coworkers (as in co-working), start-ups, etc. to purchase health insurance, not just on the state level, but national.

2. Green Tech the urban core. Provide agressive tax-incentives and rebates to spur a rebuilding/replacing of blight with new, green technology-based building and infrastructure while also reinforcing the phoenix-type of community growth already taking place.

3. Five-year moratorium on sales tax for locally/nationally produced goods and services of less than $500 in value. Spur the local economies of thousands of neighborhoods, provide a foundational incentive for start-ups of all types to test the waters, and allow for consumers to purchase the goods & services they need while pegging the revenues to locally/national manufacturers and providers.

4. Boost interconnected public transportation options. Spur both state and private investment to connect urban to suburban to rural travel. Increase the paths for commerce, interactivity, and learning. Yes, high-speed rails between urban centers would be cool, but let’s start with connecting smaller hubs to larger hubs to increase the movement of people and ideas without burdening the roadways.

5. Local food. Shift our food-supply emphasis to locally grown, prepared and delivered food. The movement is already underway, let’s amplify it and increase it’s footprint across all communities.

What am I missing? What do you recommend?

This post was sparked by a email thread with my coworkers at Waggener Edstrom, shouts to them all.

Is Google a waning giant? Yes, they are tightening their grip on long tail with Plus, social integration, etc., but in the past (AOL, MySpace, more) this tightening equated to a grasping for relevance while the market rolled on, and away.

I wonder about the users whose social messages appear in the search rankings, or the users who click the “+1 button.” Will social-capital be enough for them if their words appear in the search results? Will their Klout rewards be enough?

Brand-strength, built through a well crafted integrated, marketing campaign, will be what bubbles up from this recipe. If you look at the magnetism of brand such as Starbucks, it probably has more to do with their services and loyalty than with their social media actions. As example, I did some modest analysis for a client of a handful of corporate Twitter accounts mentioned in a Mashable post.  I used my “Matrix” exercise to manually peg these accounts to a graph.

What I found is nearly all of this test group are repeatedly speaking to the granular of their markets with hopes of resonation. More importantly, it seems, that their following is not based on their Twitter actions, but based on the “spectacular-ness” of their brand. Starbucks and JetBlue have a huge amount of followers when compared to Delta or Taco Bell or Dunkin’ Donuts. So although Dunkin’ Donuts is doing a great job with social to keep the momentum with their audience, more people are potentially “listening” to Starbucks.

In regard to Google’s further grip on the tail: Is the next step in the evolution of the social-search space a gaggle of smaller search-engines focussed on segments? A food search engine? A coffee one? What if Kayak also offered a search algorithm of the social conversations around travel? Isn’t this what the Apps eco-system is teaching us?

My question is: while Google screens through the mud to gather up the gold dust, where is the next vein to chunk away the bounty?

(originally posted on Thinkers & Doers blog, 1/11)

(The above slide was crafted by Cindi DeHoog, account executive at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, as part of a collaborative effort between the account teams and WE Studio D.)

1. Heartbeats over spikes: Craft your campaign as a sustained cadence of low, modest and high activity. A careful mix of the three can propel the campaign forward while conserving energy (budget) to boost ongoing momentum (and greater adoption). Think of your campaign as an EKG line of short pauses, minor drops and lifts of activity.

2. Invitations over packages: Invite your community into the campaign from the inception; open doors to inclusion and participation. Dropping a tidily wrapped program into social channels will not allow for the same longevity as campaigns that allow for interpretation, organic growth and interactivity.

3. Relinquishing over rigidity: “A tree that is unbending is easily broken.” When considering your campaigns, build in a flexibility that allows for the greatest interactivity and adjustments. Infuse the campaign with a life of its own,  and allow it to grow beyond your initial expectations.

Let me know your questions!