Emergence Marketing: Breakthrough ideas for 2007

January 29, 2007

(Posted by francois to: innovation | interesting links )

The Harvard Business Review just released their annual survey of emerging ideas (free until Feb 26th). It is a great read with some real cool nuggets of ideas (via O'Reilly Radar).

Some of my favorites include:

"...influentials have far less impact on social epidemics than is generally supposed. In fact, they don't seem to be required at all." - Duncan Watts, reporting on recent research he conducted on the role of influentials in trends and other social epidemics.

"Today, customers aren’t just voicing their needs to companies that are willing to listen; they’re inventing and often building what they want." - Eric Von Hippel, reporting on research that shows that the 70% to 80% of new product development that fails does so not for lack of advanced technology but because of a failure to understand users’ needs.

"As businesses respond to this backlash—as they consider management styles and marketing messages that effectively meet people’s needs for relief from continuous partial attention and the sensory overload it creates—they can differentiate themselves by offering what their employees and customers increasingly crave: discriminating choices and quality of life." - Linda Stone, reporting on living with continuous partial attention.

"By almost any measure, the larger a city’s population, the greater the innovation and wealth creation per person." - Geoffrey West, reporting on recent research that found a general mathematical relationships between population size, innovation, and wealth creation.

"People who are social, religious, or political conservatives tend to have more children...In the United States, for example, fertility rates are 12% higher in states that voted for George W. Bush in the most recent presidential election than in the more liberal and secular states that supported his opponent." - Philip Longman, reporting on research that shows that we are headed for a more conservative period worldwide (YIKES!)

"...the key to getting payback on investment in a network is to think hard about exactly what kind of value you want the network to create. In other words, you must put the work in “network” first." - Chris Meyers arguing that "work" needs to be at the center of collaborative environments to predictably succeed (something we clearly found when studying successful collaboration teams & projects amongst eRoom customers.)

Posted by francois at January 29, 2007 8:43 AM | Bookmark This

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Thanks for the heads up on the HBR article. Very interesting stuff indeed.

Posted by: PaulSweeney at January 29, 2007 11:32 AM