InnovationCreation

The end of the year is here and I am, like many of you, looking at the cross over to 2009 and 2010. To help you refresh and upgrade, here are my interesting resource picks to help refresh (re-boot?) (upgrade?).

• Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher S. Penn and John Wall provide insight and usable tools for marketing in the connected digital world. Check out the The Twitter Power Guide eBook and an audio Q&A session from a Seth Godin presentation on his book Tribes.
• Chris Brogan. Chris has insight on the community and social media "space". Hire Chris!. Actually, he said you could hire him or read his blog and get the same info for free!
• Read E-Myth. Michael Gerber wrote about being in your business more than 20 years. Great practical reading and coaching for your business.
• Edward Tufte on design. Edward Tufte, well known professor on design, has a series of books and courses that provide insight on design. He also has a very resourceful forum on his web site; check out the recent conversations on election results/data.
• Trends, everyone wants to be on the front of trends. While by no means the best or first, TrendWatching.com has material that can help provide inspiration and tickle your deep thoughts on the coming future. Good tip: Know why you are tracking trends. "Trend spotting can be fun. Makes you feel in the now and in the know. But that alone is not necessarily going to make you or your company more money. The way we see it, in a nutshell, is that tracking consumer trends is one way (and there are many ways!) to gain inspiration, helping you dream up profitable new goods, services and experiences for (and with) your customers. So trend watching should ultimately lead to profitable innovation."
• Check out Springwise for new business ideas. Springwise scans the globe for the most promising business ventures, ideas and concepts that are ready for regional or international adaptation, expansion, partnering, investments or cooperation. They ferociously track more than 400 global offline and online business resources, as well as taking to the streets of world cities, digital cameras at hand.
• Folio...Find out what the world of the print media (magazine and newspaper) is doing. Yes, you will see info on layoffs and sell-offs in the print industry. But you will also see what those companies are trying to do. It was via Folio that I discovered the blog post by Jessica DaSilva, at the time an intern at the The Tampa Tribune. She wrote a post about the Tampa Tribune's shift in strategy and the message to the staff “People need to stop looking at TBO.com as an add on to The Tampa Tribune,” editor in chief Janet Coats said. “The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add on to TBO.”

Have a Happy New Year!

Labels: business, culture, deep thought, design, environment, experience, new media, social media, startup, trends

I just stopped by Goodwill to donate some books and decided to go in to see this store. It is labeled the "Goodwill Outlet Store" and I was thinking "Outlet store, Goodwill, uh???".

Was I amazed! Inside the store is a large open format space, large ceilings, and lots of floor space. Huge! And the merchandise? It is only organized in to large rolling bins by rough kind (shows, books, large items, clothes) and that is it. Normal Goodwill stores sort and order and hang items so you can shop like any other retail store. However, this outlet store, all the sorting and ordering is really done by the shoppers.

Turns out the outlet stores are the end of the line for all the items and stuff that does not get sold or moved at the normal stores. About every two hours a new batch of things arrives at the outlet store and placed in the low, long rolling bins. And you just hunt and search for things.

You can identify the "pros" right off. They are wearing gloves and moving pretty quickly. This is a treasure chest waiting for the right person to find the treasures. I asked one gentleman about this. He was wearing rubber yard gloves and was moving pretty fast through the bins. He was looking for a power supply to a laptop he bought several days ago. He says he spends a few lunch hours a week at the outlet store combing and sorting, mainly looking for great finds on electronics. He said the gloves are needed because there are items in the bins that do break and are sharp.

How is this stuff priced? By the pound! You truck your goods up to the register and they have a scale to weigh your haul.

What is really a whack in the head moment is the brilliance in how Goodwill is tapping the wisdom of the crowd to sort out the goods; You as an interested buyer will do the searching and sorting. Anything of value is sold and anything left over after several cycles is eventually hauled out as the really truly junk of the junk.

Labels: crowd source, design, environment, great, innovation, tap the crowd

This last weekend I had the chance to participate in a discussion of the ideas from Deep Economy: The Wealth Of Communities And The Durable Future put on by Smaller Indiana at the IUPUI Herron School of Art and Design. Bill McKibben, the book's author, presented for about 30 minutes and then a group of Citizen Panelists dialogged about the core ideas contained in the book and related that to central Indiana: consumption & growth, local food, and durable futures.

After the event, I had the opportunity to chat with Bill about a recent interview he gave where he said he preferred the words Mature and Durable over Green and Sustainable. I asked him to elaborate.

He said that we as humans have no connection to the words Green and Sustainable; when we are young we know we will grow and that growth is a good thing. Once we reach a certain age we stop growing (physically) and move into a mature state. In this context, mature is understood because we live with its meaning. As an aside, Bill said that, unfortunately, the word mature has been taken over by the AARP and can have good / bad meaning, depending on where you are on the age curve:)

Sustainable is another word we have no direct experience with in day-to-day life. When you say something is "sustainable" what do you really mean and how can I relate to it? However, we do have life experiences for the word "durable"; when we buy something of cheep plastic we know it is not going to last, but something made of fine leather or wood has the feeling of longevity and is durable. Look at the tools made by Durabuilt... they even took the feature of the tools, durability, and made it part of the product's brand name. Trying to do that for the word sustainability (sutainbuilt?) ...

Labels: community, environment, future