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.

Remembering Michael Hammer

"Success begins by determining whether you are the kind of person with the stuff of success -- and if you are not, transforming yourself into someone who is."

--Michael Hammer, Beyond Reengineering, 1996

It often takes years for people to look at an emerging technology and “get it right” when framing the economic and social implications. What is amazing about Michael Hammer, who tragically died in an accident August 22nd, is that he got it right just as the new technology was being born.

In computing’s monolithic era -- before ERP and the Web -- technology was more about doing things more efficiently, not necessarily differently. The new technologies were powerful precisely because they were more about moving the cow paths than about simply paving them. His call to re-engineer the corporation was the perfect construct with which to communicate that message to those actually writing the checks.


It would have been all well and good to call for a process orientation that cuts across functional silos -- but until the means existed to do that in a way that was scalable, it wasn’t going to happen. It’s a legitimate question whether the massive technology investments of the 1990s would have occurred at all had it not been for the popularization of re-engineering among non-technical audiences.

Talk about connecting the dots. Hammer’s contribution wasn’t simply a translation of bits and bytes to dollars and cents. He gave the new technologies an emotional edge. Re-engineering brought the feel of a movement into forums not known before or (sadly) since for embracing “revolution.” He will be missed.