Handy links: Brands in Public, Zeo Sleep Coach

Brands in Public is a collection of interesting, accessible, public-facing dashboards for your favorite brands – from Zappos to Virgin America to In-n-Out Burger. Each dashboard organizes a hot list of what’s being said about the brand around the web, via Twitter and blogs and YouTube and Google Trends and more. As well as polls and debates and commenting for people who want to do more than just watch. – Bands in Public

Developed with leading sleep scientists, Zeo is a new kind of educational tool and motivational program that helps you understand how you are sleeping, reveals habits and behaviors that may be helping or hindering your sleep, and teaches new ways that may help you get a better night’s rest. -Zeo

Note: These podcast were recorded last week, so you might hear some less-than-timely mentions. Now that the Noodleplayer is up and running, this won’t happen again. Thanks.

An important point here is that the focus of strategic innovation is NOT on technological aspects or brand aspects, but rather on the re-conceptualization of the industry/business design in order to create fundamentally new and superior customer value and/or competition positioning. Brands will play an important part in the mobilization process. In addition, brands will take the center stage when the story telling begins. Any innovation strategy will need to be translated into a brand story. The idea is to be able to use different elements of stories and storytelling to drive change. “Innovation” and “change” go hand-in-hand and that’s when people get confused about the roles of brands.

Innovation as strategy implies breaking free from taken-for-granted assumptions about how each player competes and their intra- and inter-organizational ways of working. Companies must deviate from the dominant industry recipe. The concept of “active inertia” was first introduced by Donald Sull (London Business School). He refers to breaking through established patterns which is often difficult. He uses the concept of “active inertia” to indicate that even very successful companies/ marketers have difficulty adapting to a new way of doing business.

So what are key barriers that stop successful companies from being successful? Well its called “active inertia”: established strategic frames become blinders, processes become routines, stakeholder relations turn out to be shackles and values derail into dogmas.  What can you do? (my abridged deck above has some of the answers). I use this presentation as part of our innovation program and hopefully will help you see some of the “whys”?
Some people think that by throwing in a bunch of trend monkeys and brand parrots you can produce plenty of ideas. But the question is, are you framing it the right way and solving the right problem? Many make the mistake of framing the problem too narrowly either through a brand lens or capability considerations. I hope you enjoy this abridged version.