How Innovators Market Themselves

"If you have a problem, use InnoCentive to ask everyone."

-- NYTimes.com

If what we have now is the innovation economy, then my client InnoCentive is an excellent example of a relevant business model. To "get" what InnoCentive does, read paragraph two of its new corporate brochure:

Using InnoCentive's Web 2.0 platform, a "Seeker" organization posts a "Challenge" -- a problem for which it seeks a breakthrough solution -- to the InnoCentive Marketplace and commits to pay a successful "Solver" a cash award. InnoCentive Seekers benefit from a "pay for performance" low-risk environment where they only pay for solutions they accept. InnoCentive Seekers are among the world's most innovative and creative commercial, government and non-profit enterprises....

What I like about InnoCentive, besides sheer coolness, is the extent to which business strategy is part of marketing content.

One of the themes I try to drive home in this blog is that the business logic behind your customer's success is the business logic behind your success. They are one and the same. Furthermore, logic is not something you can express in pictures. Words -- carefully crafted -- are the pivot point for whatever other marketing leverage you can apply.

As this particular writing sample shows, business strategy doesn't just drive and shape the innovator's communications story. It is the story. In fact, the more innovation matters in a company's business plan, the more important it is to convey the business plan's central premise in the company's ongoing marketing communications.