INNIOVATION SKILL SET: WHAT IS OBSERVATION AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

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            An All-Pro NFL linebacker and a world class social media marketer have one thing in common. To be successful, both have to “read their keys”. In football, a linebacker will observe only certain players. That will tell him where the next play will be run. The same way is true in social media marketing.

            The “player” that a marketer keys on in this analogy is your customer and the “key” that you read in order to be successful is how a customer uses your product.  To be a successful marketer you have to be innovative. A major key in being innovative is your ability to observe your customer. Observation is best described by that immortal, Dr. Yogi Berra, “You can see an awful lot just by watching”. This is a prescient observation about what observation is. You watch to see how your customer uses your product. This will give you keen insights in how to improve or market your product.

            A marketer who has done this is Kelly Rowland, the singer.  As I write this article in August of 2011, Ms. Rowland is having great success. The reason why Ms. Rowland’s brand is so successful is because she observed her fans. She “keyed” on them. Her fans have given Ms. Rowland great insight into what they want. Ms. Rowland is a humble woman, but she is a keen marketer. How she has marketed her music is a benchmark to be followed in the marketing of any product.

            Ms. Rowland’s strategy started with a plan and a goal. Her goal was to become the top brand in R&B. She then observed and keyed on her fans to get an insight on how to do this. She observed what music they were buying and what artists lead her genre. She observed that the leading genre of R&B is dance music.

            Ms. Rowland’s observations of her fans made her realize that she had to redefine her brand.  Ms. Rowland’s observation made her become innovative. Ms. Rowland has had success in her career. She has won Grammy’s. Her success was in blues R&B and Gospel. After observing her fans, she realized that to become a player in music, she would have to be innovative.  She realized that she would have to become edgier in both music and in her stage appearance. She would have to become a “new Kelly”.  How to do this?

            Again, the principal is, first observation and then creating a brand through innovation. This is how Ms. Rowland innovated. She sang a duet with a well-known rapper known for edgy lyrics.  However, in the video, the rapper never appears with Ms. Rowland. The lines he sings in the song are very few. By doing it this way, the song “belonged to Kelly”. The video and the song took off.

            Ms. Rowland was innovative in her way of marketing the song. She used YouTube. This is a free sight. The song and video was stylish and edgy. The song took off. Social media is viral. Soon the people were taking the video and song and posting to their friends through social media sights.

            YouTube was an innovative choice for Ms. Rowland. The sight has a “comment” section. She could see first- hand how fans were reacting to the song. She could see how the fans responded to her. She then started giving interviews on video and putting them on YouTube next to the video.  She could answer fan questions in real time, and build a following.

This building of a following was important. The dance R&B is a crowded space. Through an innovative use of YouTube, Kelly observed just when the best time to release her album. When it was released it was No. 3 in the first week.

To create a great brand, first you observe your customers, and then you innovate.  Dr. Yogi Berra best describes the process of observation and innovation, “It ain’t over to till it’s over… and then it ain’t over”.

Dean Hambleton

dnhambleton@gmail.com

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

HOW RWANDA CAN PARTNER WITH APPLE TO CREATE A MIDDLE CLASS

                The nation of Rwanda wants to forsake its sordid past, look ahead, and create a future for its people. Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame  is partnering with Western entrepreneurs to create jobs in his country. President Kagame’s vision is to lure private investment to Rwanda, train a new generation of managers and “in country” entrepreneurs, and join the global economy as a charter member in good standing. The ultimate goal is to move the country away from foreign aid. President Kagame’s model is the Asian Tigers of the 1980s. The Tigers were South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

            The Tigers were overpopulated, had little reserves, and they were overpopulated. They are similar to present day Africa. The Tigers biggest asset was the Pacific Ocean. This allowed the Tigers to create an export economy. This export economy allowed the Tigers to create a middle class economy and to join the modern world. The Tigers evolved from being an emerging economy to being a significant economic player in the world global system. This is President Kagame’s vision for Africa. President Kagame has a vision for the development of the African Gorillas.  These are a group of African nations that want to create strong, middle class, entrepreneurial economies that create jobs. Africa is an emerging economy. President Kagame’s vision is that Africa will stop being an international state and become a strong player in the globalized economy. 

            The Tigers had the Ocean. The Gorillas have two assets in a creating a middle class economy. They have social media and they have personal relationships with major western entrepreneurs. Social media creates great scale, and content is allowed to move easily and quickly.  If apps can be localized, those apps can penetrate rich diverse global markets.

            A strong wireless telecom network is a must for President Kagame as he tries to build Rwanda’s economy. This is where relationships come into play. An entrepreneur that is partnering with Rwanda is Scott Ford. Mr. Ford is the former head of Alltel Wireless. This company developed a large wireless network in the rural South, which is similar to Rwanda.

            Rwanda needs cell phones for its development to take off, but they need cell phones of a certain type. They have to have smart phones, but dressed down smart phones. It is the development of these specialized smart phones that may hold a key to Rwanda’s development.

            There is a new concept that has developed entitled reverse innovation. In years past, organizations would develop products for mature western markets, and then simplify (dumb down) the product for Third World Markets. Reverse innovation is when simple products are developed in a Third World country and then is sold in a Western Economy. Many times there is a market for this simple version of a larger product.

            In the case of Smart Phones, not everyone needs the tens of thousands Apps on a conventional I Phone. Rwanda needs a simple phone, with ease of use. Rwanda has a population which is 50% under the age of 16. The population has limited conventional educational exposure. The Rwandan smart phone must have simple, easy to understand touch graphics. Many Rwandans are illiterate.

Apple could partner with Rwanda, develop and manufacture a simple I phone. This phone could be an example of classic reverse innovation. There is a vast market for Apple in the States for a simple, smart phone. For Rwanda to develop as a middle class economy, a manufacturing base must be created in Rwandan cities. Presently 80% of Rwandans are subsidence farmers.

The Rwandan smart phone could be manufactured in Rwanda, and marketed in both the U. S. and Rwanda. Labor prices in Rwanda would be low in comparison to the U.S., but the manufacturing base would be the beginning of a Rwandan middle class. An operation such as this would create sustainable job s in Rwanda. This is only a simple way of describing a way in which Rwanda and the rest of the African Gorillas could join the global economy. Obviously, the devil would be in the details.

Dean Hambleton

dnhambleton@gmail.com