Recession Strategies Part 3 -- Open Innovation

"Bringing the InnoCentive marketplace to our communities marks a new era in how SAP, customers, partners and the community at large can come together to innovate and solve real business challenges."

--Zia Yusuf, executive vice president, Global Ecosystem and Partner Group, SAP

Not every company gets to put its own section on the SAP website, like my client InnoCentive just did. As the writer, my job was to sell a brand new model of interaction involving SAP, its customers and its community of independent developers. The model is open innovation and InnoCentive is widely acknowledged as the open innovation leader.

I had just written the company’s corporate brochure that presents the whole concept of open innovation across industries and InnoCentive’s role in it.

The challenge this time was more focused — to answer the questions: What is open innovation and why should members of SAP’s own innovation ecosystem care? That ecosystem is both complex and immense, populated by SAP AG itself, its enterprise customers, and legions of independent SAP consultants ranging from individual contributors to multi-billion dollar companies. If those questions are not answered effectively, this relationship could get very confusing very fast. Not good for a partnership with such high visibility.

For tech companies looking for their own “answers” in tough times, open innovation offers great lessons in how to make things happen anyway. Like this lesson: Open the door and invite outsiders in. Closed systems don’t have all the answers. The best answers often come from those you might not even think to ask.

Have Some Juice

As you may have noticed from recent posts, several clients this fall have been preoccupied with juice. There’s nothing like an economic crisis to focus the mind. And I think juice is going to receive much more focus in the months ahead.

Everyone knows juice when they see it. It’s the difference between just going through the motions and really making a connection. It’s the creative spark, the excitement, the breakout thinking, the energy, the innovation -- fill in your own definition.

Why focus on juice now? Three reasons. First, every penny counts. Nobody these days is going to invest in an idea that’s not going to take them somewhere. And that takes juice.

Second, juice is non-linear. You can have a transformative idea in the shower. You can also spend $50,000 on a corporate brainstorming retreat and come up with squat. So, when it comes to your juice supply, reliability is everything.

Third, juice is as fungible as cash. A great new idea will take form over and over again in an almost endless variety of flavors. That’s how you tell an idea is great. It is “obvious” -- the most likely to be imitated.

The real advantage then is not the great idea. It’s the juice -- the speed, originality and energy with which great new ideas happen in the first place. Execution is essential but not transformative. And transformation is what we need now.

With that as a prelude, let me show you my own latest postcard mailing. Here is side one (click the image to enlarge).



And side two . . .

Define a New Sweet Spot

“Thanks Randy. This looks really good.”

-- Venkat Krishnan, Senior Director, IPTV & Strategic Market Solutions, SeaChange International

My client Venkat Krishnan at SeaChange International is a genius when it comes to recognizing the potential value from technology assets. SeaChange is the leading provider of TV headend technology to telcos and cable companies. (They’ve won multiple Emmys.) If you have a big screen TV at home that receives programs through a wire, chances are good that SeaChange servers and software are at the other end of that wire.

For years, the big trend in this industry was “triple play” and more recently “quad play” -- meaning TV, phone, Internet and now mobile delivered by a single carrier with the ability to mix and match services and content across channels. The idea, of course, is to maximize utilization of each channel while simultaneously taking a greater portion of the consumer’s spend. The consumer gets the convenience of a single provider and a bundled price and in exchange the provider gets account control of the consumer.

Enabling triple play and quad play has been a well-known sweet spot for technology providers like SeaChange. Venkat’s insight was to define (and enable) a different kind of quad play -- not in terms of channel but market -- as in home, hotel, hospital and PC. Residential providers have not traditionally focused on these other markets. Now, thanks to some technology innovation they can. And, in fact, they can use most of the technology infrastructure they already have for residential.

The magic here is sheer marketing -- defining an under-appreciated asset and promoting it. If you want to know more, please read the white paper -- my third partnership with Venkat. Previous work for SeaChange includes their corporate brochure and two white papers for their video on demand server group. You can check those out in the window below:

Recession Strategies Part 2

"There is an important meeting today at your company -- between AV and IT. You should be there."

--Advanced AV corporate brochure

Holding conferences to spike sales is hardly creative. But what is creative is holding a conference and making it look like it’s a true industry tradeshow rather than just a typical vendor-sponsored event. That’s what my client Advanced AV did recently with their CTEC 2008 Conference. Note the branding. They could have called it the Advanced AV conference.

Advanced AV, based outside Philadelphia, is a leading provider of audiovisual technology and consulting -- anything from a single slide projector rental to a complete university campus private cable TV network.

This was the fifth annual CTEC Conference. By inviting their technology providers to participate as speakers and exhibitors (a privilege for which they pay), the event doesn’t smack of self-promotion even as it makes Advanced AV look more like an industry leader. All of Advanced AV’s technology partners signed up as sponsors, including NEC, Sony, and Panasonic. A conference like this is also a great way to move yourself to the top of your partners’ referral lists.

My involvement was to write Advanced AV’s corporate brochure. I’ve done several projects for them in the past -- so they were familiar with my work -- and at the last minute they decided not to go with the copy that their web design firm had provided. I appreciated the opportunity to show them what was possible on such a key assignment with just three days notice.

The challenge here was to convey several core messages in a very small amount of text. My approach was to use the “nightmare scenario” -- an experience dreaded by everyone who has run a meeting. This adds drama to the copy, which is often a challenge in technology or corporate brochures. It also makes the copy shorter since it provides a convenient check-off list of reasons to hire an AV expert. A writer could have just started out by claiming how great the company is or by reciting customer needs, but that’s very conventional and much less engaging.

Take a look for yourself. In the window above, I have divided the brochure up into its cover and inside spreads, which you can view as individual PDF downloads.