Innovation, Web 2.0, Virtual Worlds, Conversations
Posted on November 17, 2007
Filed Under What's New |
Almost everyone I’ve spoken too recently says the biggest difference between today’s web activity and the dotcom boom is that today most people are ready to help. There’s a great spirit of cooperation out there. Was in London last week and what a strong sense that individuals in their various networks can change what big companies are doing. That is the same sense that working together people can affect changes to the Web.
Which brings me to large companies and the innovation unit. There’s hardly a company I’ve spoken to lately that doesn’t have an innovation unit. It’d be fascinating to get a handle on how the innovation unit differs from the strategy unit but my sense is that though it varies across companies the innovation unit can be the renegade member of the family that every company has always needed, but was too afraid to admit it.
Companies are a quarter of the way to a new kind of status and position in society, with their employees, and ultimately in the eyes of the people who drive financial markets. They no longer have control.
In the old paradigm they did the R&D, built the product, mapped out the market, advertised, launched and succeeded or got on with the next product. Pretty much the same was true with service companies. Research, plan and roll out.
I suspect innovation units if they are doing the right job will be getting the message across that this is no longer possible, that large companies will have to be broken down into small - call it company, unit, family - segments that are able to reason for themselves and are able to participate in the right groups and conversations. There is no short cut to this and no way to industrialise it. You can’t economise on conversation.
Perhaps the most telling discussion I’ve had in the past five years was with Jo Green at Philips who said that their model organisation is the Slow Food Movement. Self-starting, community-based, built on passion, focused on craft. She could equally have pointed to one of the many networks that are evolving to work out what Web 2.0 means or to unravel the consequences of virtual worlds.
Most individuals I meet are making their own Slow movements, but of course they are doing it pretty quickly. I mean they are becoming part of something that is outside the corporate world, not dependent on corporate supply chains or corporate value chains, and which are quite obviously anti-corporate ways of doing things, which in turn means testing how far authenticity can go, how far marketing can actually go down the route of total honesty.
That seems to me to be the territory innovation units will need to contest - how to debrand, how to rebuild their offer around experiences that people engage with in a more conscious way. And another thought occurs to me - the difference between brand and luxury goods. The elements that make lucury so compelling are th elements that need to be wrapped into regular products and services. That after all is what characterises the Slow Food movement.
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