Innovation is the ability to confront a new set of circumstances and to create a solution in real time. An example would be watching a football game on television. A team has spent an entire week preparing for a certain game. The opposing coach comes out with a new formation. Innovation occurs when the first team figures out a way to offset this new set of circumstances. Innovation is changing the game plan in real time and off-setting your opponents surprise. Innovation is a critical skill set to have in the era of social media. Social media creates scale. The ease of use that social media affords is both a great asset, but also a great liability. A marketer in the social media age needs great skills in branding, redefining, and repositioning products.
In social media, great amounts of content are being created overnight. This means that new products and new brands are constantly making their appearance in the market place. When a new brand appears, how does a conventional marketer create a branding strategy to off-set this new product? Association is the ability to connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields. Association may also be described as the “Medici” effect. This refers to the creative explosion brought on by the Medici family in Florence, when the Medici’s brought together the creative energy of sculptors, painters, scientists, poet, philosophers, and architects. As these individuals connected, new ideas blossomed at the intersection of their respective fields, bringing on the Renaissance, one of the most inventive eras in World History.
To understand how association works, you have to understand how the brain works. The brain works more like a Google search engine, than it does a dictionary. Google search is about your conventional experience with a word. If you Google “Red Sox”, you might get many hits concerning Fenway Park or the history of April of 1912. In contrast, if look up “Red Sox” in a dictionary, you would get a straight definition of what socks, and not sox, is.The more diverse our experience and knowledge the more connections the brain can make. The more connections we can make, the more innovative we can be. This is why reading and being aware of the world around us is a critical thing for a social media marketer. Fresh inputs trigger new associations; this leads to new, fresh and unusual ideas. As Steve Jobs has said, “creativity is connecting things”. The world’s most innovative companies prosper by capitalizing on the divergent associations of their founders.
Associating is like a mental muscle that can grow stronger by exercising. Innovation is created by exercising our minds and our imaginations. As innovators engage in these behaviors, they build their ability to generate ideas that can be recombined in new ways. The more frequently people attempt to understand, categorize, and store new knowledge, the more easily their brains could naturally and consistently make, store, and combine associations.
Innovation is critical as Africa attempts to create a middle class market economy. In an era of social media, of fast, easy to use telecom networks, entrepreneurs can come to Africa. By using innovation these entrepreneurs can quickly create content that has a strong market and create middle class jobs for Africans.
Dean Hambleton
dnhambleton@gmail.com
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