Consider Continuous Improvement

"Practitioners of open source are picking up where quality left off to rethink their organizational structures and systems."

-- Andrea Garbor

One of the benefits of writing about trends in different fields and time periods is that you see which business strategies keep paying off and why. If a strategy works across industries, technologies or economic circumstances, you can often re-purpose lessons learned elsewhere to a new set of facts. As a marketing writer, you can also usually exploit various parallels and distinctions to inform your audience why your client's current strategy is the "true" course.

Take the continuous-improvement-for-sustainable-competitive-advantage strategy. That theme works great for clients as diverse as Analytics Operations Engineering (website: process optimization), Innocentive (brochure: open innovation), cumulusIQ (whitepaper: knowledge as a service), and Enigma (whitepaper: integrated service solution).

Only the context changes. For Analytics and Enigma it's more Quality Movement (a la Six Sigma). For Innocentive and cumulusIQ it's more Open Collaboration.

But the Quality Movement and Open Collaboration are really two sides of the same coin according to Andrea Garbor in her excellent article titled, “The Promise (and Perils) of Open Collaboration” (Strategy+Business, Autumn, 2009, Booz & Co.). (Registration required.)

According to Garbor, both rely on a common set of principles (she lists seven) for achieving sustainable competitive advantage. Take, for example, principle #4, her call to "cultivate continuous improvement.” Incremental improvement (in Quality Movement speak) or incremental innovation (in Open Collaboration speak) produces products that are of higher quality, better suited to what the user needs now, and carry less risk.

So if you are looking for a theme worth cultivating in your own context, continuous improvement might be worth a look.