THE INNOVATOR'S SKILL SET; WHAT IS ASSOCIATION?

               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            

WHAT IS CREATIVITY AND HOW DOES THIS CREATE INNOVATIVE PEOPLE?

WHAT IS CREATIVITY AND HOW DOES THIS CREATE INNOVATIVE PEOPLE?

            Africa is in the process of evolving from an emerging economy to a middle class market economy.  For this to happen, Africa must have creative and innovative entrepreneurs to build Africa’s economy.  Creativity is the finding of a solution to a problem that was formerly, seemingly unattainable.

To make Africa into a thriving, market economy would seem to be an insurmountable task. Creative and innovative entrepreneurs that create legitimate jobs can do this. Let’s think about creativity and how it creates innovative people for a minute.

 Creativity is important because it demands innovative people.  Innovative people have the ability to connect a group of different things, different groups of information, and then place this information into a logical, understandable whole.  

The ability to innovate is the culmination of many experiences. What makes innovators different? Harvard researchers spent 6 years and interviewed three thousand executives to find out. The number one skill that separates innovators from noncreative professional is “associating”.  Associating is the ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields. The more diverse our experience and knowledge, the more connections the brain can make. Fresh inputs trigger new associations. The new associations lead to new, innovative solutions to problems.

            When you ask creative people how they did something they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it; they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. The reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they had thought more about their experiences than other people.

 Unfortunately, creativity is too rare a commodity. A lot of people haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very specific solutions to the problem. The broader one understands the human experience, the more creativity they will have.

            The ability to create is based on experience from a great many different sources. You draw on those diverse experiences and then you bring the whole together. Highly creative people are skilled at making associations, connecting seemingly unrelated things. Most important very creative people make a conscious decision to do so. They don’t always know where the dots will connect, but they are confident that they will.

            At the present time, Africa is in the process of evolving from being an emerging market into becoming a middle class economy. How can this be done? It would seem out of the question that a continent such as Africa could even think of joining the family of nations as a legitimate player. Social media has changed all that.

            Social media is the creation of engaging content that another group of people would want. What is needed is a platform. We live in a world of the smart phones. In the world that we live in, a creative African fashion designer could very easily create African dresses that are desired by Western audiences. She could place these designs on YouTube, and be an overnight (literally) success. A scenario that I have stated is not out of the question.

Dean Hambleton

dnhambleton@gmail.com

WHAT IS INNOVATION AND HOW DO YOU ACHIEVE IT?

WHAT IS INNOVATION AND HOW DO YOU ACHIEVE IT?

            At the present time, the continent of Africa is on the move economically. It is attempting to move from being an emerging market to being a middle class economy. Africa has the desire to be a significant player in the globalized economy. We are seeing the emergence of the African Gorillas.

If this is going to happen, African is going to need entrepreneurs to create jobs. Jobs are the key to Africa’s development. Foreign aid has a chilling effect on a society. It makes a nation and a people dependent. When people are gainfully employed, if frees them.  This is why jobs are so critical to the development of Africa. Innovation is the key to development of Africa.

 Let’s just ask a basic question, “What is innovation”? “How is it achieved?”       Innovation is the creating of “cool stuff”. This cool stuff is both necessary and unnecessary. Some things are cool, but not necessary, like jewelry or fashion, but they are nice thing to have.

Innovation is the bringing to life of Robert Kennedy’s quote, “People see things and ask ‘why’ and “how” and “can we, I wonder”.  An innovator will see things and ask ‘why not’.  To create innovation, you also have to create a culture for it.

            Innovation is the outdoing of the competition. Innovation does create competitive advantage for both a company, and also for a continent, such as Africa.

            To be entrepreneurial, you must constantly engender new ideas. Good ideas happen whenever you have thinking people. How are they created? Receptiveness and reward are ways to engage people to give their best and feel they have a stake in the company.  Through ideas, people challenge one another in a way that is not overwhelming. A leader will inspire competition and inspiration by showing their confidence that each person in the organization can express creativity in his or her own way. This new idea may be in product design, product usage. It may be in anything that involves the organization.

Innovation is mostly done by seeing how people use the product.  Creativity and innovation is “hands-on” but it is also “hands off”.  It is observing “what works” and “what doesn’t work”. It is about honesty, and the foregoing of silos.

            There is a “gotta”.  You “gotta” have a culture for this to work. You have to encourage people to discover new things, to see things differently. People in a professional culture have to be open to new things. Creativity takes leadership. Creativity is not just allowing people in an organization to just go off in their own direction. There must be at least some “adult supervision” for creativity to be developed.

            You “gotta” allow people to make mistakes, because they will. You are dealing with new things. When something is new, no one really knows if the thing will work. 

            In creating a culture for creativity, the wisdom of crowds is imperative. Through encouraging employees and their ideas, you get a grassroots intelligence network. Employees will focus on new things in that are in marketplace. They and their work teams will talk about them, discuss their advantages and shortcomings, test them, play with them…and then wonder, “What can we do that is better?” From these discussions, new products will be developed. A benchmark for innovative companies is Google. They are encouraged to think of new things. These new things are discussed. They are then developed and created. Google Maps was created in this manner.

Dean Hambleton

dnhambleton@gmail.com

REVERSE BRANDING: HOW MATT DAMON IS CREATING A WATER BRAND WITH CUSTOMERS AND NOT FOR THEM

REVERSE BRANDING: HOW IS MATT DAMON CREATING A WATER BRAND WITH CUSTOMERS AND NOT FOR THEM

            Reverse branding is a critical part of branding in the social media era. It is something that a social media marketer must be aware of. Reverse branding occurs when customers themselves brand the entrepreneurs. The brand for entrepreneur creates the brand for the product.

Reverse branding revolves around repositioning the market. Repositioning revolves redefining a market. Many times when markets are repositioned, the paradigm shift is not noticed by the general public. Game changing   entrepreneurs, such as Henry Ford and Steven Jobs, do understand that there have been sudden changes in the ways that markets operate. The only way that a new, repositioned markets can be created is because customers have great confidence in the entrepreneur---that because this entrepreneur is so talented, the new product must be all right. In 1908, Henry Ford realized that the auto market had repositioned itself around lowest cost. In 2007, Steven Jobs realized that the telecommunications market had shifted from a place that centered on communicating voice messages to a market in which data is communicated.

Water is more than $12 billion market.  Actor Matt Damon is creating a brand in water by positioning the market around “the least of these”---people in Third World countries who are dirt poor, who at first glance seem to have no resources to either create or consume at a level that is needed to create a world class brand. Matt is devising a world class brand in water by linking stakeholders. He is linking consumers and developers of water in the Third World. These people are the same. They are citizens of third world villages. Matt is creating jobs in villages to create water. His is arranging for microfinaniers to invest in the villages. This is an ironic combination.The people in the villages are economically destitute and the financiers are hardened businessmen with a cold eye for the bottom line.  Matt is bringing these two seemingly disparate groups together because, together, they have the ability to create a world class brand in water.

            This water brand is being created through reverse branding. Both groups have great confidence in Matt Damon. The fact that Matt Damon is involved creates credibility in the minds of the two disparate groups. Each has created, in their minds, a brand for Matt that allows this project to move forward. The poor villagers have motivation to create a good product. They cannot live without good water. Neither can their families, especially the children.

Because of the quality of the workers, they are an excellent investment target for financiers, who want to become involved in a major contemporary market. Matt Damon is an excellent bench mark for philanthropy. Almost all Fortune 500 companies “give back”. This is a wonderful thing. Matt Damon is developing clean water in destitute villages in Africa by creating significant jobs for good people. He has created a major investment opportunity for private banks. He has created the potential for a major brand in water to be created. He has done this because the confidence that the two separate and disparate groups have in him. He has created a brand in water through reverse branding.

Dean Hambleton

dnhambleton@gmail.com