Disruptive Changes

There is no room for doubts that a revolution on business models has arrived ant that it has come to stay. The concept of business innovation has already jumped off from within companies Head Quarters to a wider range world plenty of new ideas establishing a double way road for innovative relationships between companies and its peers, its competitors, its customers, its suppliers and other stakeholders.

In my point of view these new scenarios have come to replace old ones. Nevertheless for companies succeed in this future world they ought to foreseen what sort of new business or new technology is going to last longer. New model arrivals come so often that gets hard to know exactly what is going to succeed or what is predestined to fail. It seems to go like the recent competition between 2 new technologies for high definition in movies recording; Blu-Ray against HD-DVD. There is a chance for both cohabit in this new world, but there is a higher chance for one to fail and the other becomes the new world adopted model of recording data. The same competition happened a few years ago between Sony Betamax and VHS recording system. Betamax was vanished as the market chose VHS as a preferred technology. I personally make my bets on Blu-Ray to succeed.

I believe new business models brought up by new technologies and new thinking innovations will face multiple results. It will be similar to a Product Life Cycle. New business models (that l will call as NBM for easier further mention) will have NBM Life Cycle. Some will last very short, others will last longer and others much longer. Moreover, even those NBM which last longer than others based on its success, will need to be refreshed in the future in order to keep its attractiveness facing newer NBM that will eventually pop up.

Below we can see how NBM life cycle might happened in comparison with regular PLC’s. This is a chart extracted from “Global Marketing”, Pearson Education 2007 - 4e de Svede Hollensen where shows different life cycles faced by Sony Betamax and VHS products, among others.

I do not believe on NBM as a trend or a shift. I think it is going to be a positive combination of both. We can foresee that some NBM will be fashion as a newcomer and will disappear soon due to lack of long term consistence or due to other NBM better timing adjusted approach. For those NMB that will last longer (we may think about years of life), a refresh of ideas, concepts, and new technologies must be implemented to not allow the start of its declining period of life cycle. In this case, refreshment will represent an extension of life cycle. What, definitely is not going to happen, is the maintenance of the Status Quo for old-fashioned business models based on its past success.

The most amazing and robust changing process come from the media sector. Due to the Digital Convergence, that has shown an impressive fast evolution, media sector has changed for good. There is no more apart media industries, such as it was set up in the very recent past; movie industry, paper media industry, TV industry, music recording industry and so on. The boundaries of media industry have blurred and continue to banish any sort of distance among them. Interactivity between all sort of media broadcast and media electronic devices is already on place, however, evolution of new technologies has poping up so quickly that will improve it to unpredictable levels. The changes are coming in a so fast pace that we can barely comprehend. Ordinary people are amazed and trying to understand what is happening in this world. As stated by Ross Dawson, Chairman of Future Exploration Network, “we will soon have to explain CDs and DVDs to our children”.

Easy to identify changes that have impacted this sector;

 Hardly we will see a movie company as it was in the past. Now they are just a part of a media conglomerate. Big players in the media industry are buying companies who are specialized in different fields of media and technology companies focus on media integration, aiming to attend new demands created from digital convergence. According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers in its Media Market report published in 2007, a massive 43 billion worth of complementary media fields’ deals took place in Europe in 2006. Furthers 40 billion was expected to be done in 2007. The main reason is the expected re-direction of advertising investments on different sort of medias, in detriment to old models. For the next few years is expected to see a fast growing on digital advertising mainly on paid search, mobile and videos. Also, new segments of digital advertising are expected to emerge as personalized outdoor and in-building advertising, and advertising in virtual world. For example, newspaper may be delivered on e-paper as new forum for digital and personalized advertisements.

 Another change, based on the ability of people of getting used to new technologies and making deeper use of it is the growth of personalization of media products being made available. As an example, the majority of the 7 billion online videos streamed each month are user generated. The media sector is running after this new sort of audience which has already enlarged the size of each niche on the long tail, becoming more and more important on commercial matters. Media companies must to pace faster to keep selling its products and ads. YouTube, for instance, has established itself as one of the most popular online sites globally, exemplifying the impressive fragmentation on video programming and, as consequence, its new broader marketing segmentation.

Philips Guerrilla Marketing - For those who has chosen The Philips Case Study as final assignment of International marketing, here is a nice video

Crowd-sourcing for hospitality industry

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InnoCentive Business

InnoCentive is a Market Place structured by a web company which enables companies searching for R&D solutions to reach an extensive number of unknown professionals worldwide which may help to find effective answers to questions which puzzled them.
innoCentive, which has its name designed by a fusion of the words innovation and incentive, set up a platform which creates this Market Place, where a revolution can take place on the way companies or non-profit organizations seek for people who have capability, inventiveness and, through this tool, possibility to bring out to the world their innovative solutions for what initially seemed to be impossible to be solved through traditional methods of R&D.

The beauty of this process relies on its simplicity. Who needs a solution for any sort of problem, in all field of acknowledgement (from Chemistry to Business and Entrepreneurship, from Physical Sciences to Engineering and Designs), the SeekerTM, as so-called by InnoCentive, post it on InnoCentive website and offer a prize for who else, the InnoCentive SolversTM, believe can come up with effective answers for the puzzle. The prizes vary essentially from $10.000 to $100.000 per problem solved.

This new concept of relationship between companies and individuals is known as Open Innovation. The central idea of Open Innovation, as defined on Wikipedia, is that “in a world of widely distributed knowledge, companies cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license processes or inventions (i.e. patents) from other companies. In addition, internal inventions not being used in a firm’s business should be taken outside the company.”



Problems solved
From the customer’s point of view by adopting Open Innovation model companies can dramatically reduce the pitfalls, costs, and risks associated with closed innovation. Companies who have realized its business model is more important than its technology, its Intellectual Property – IP or Patents by itself have acquired more motivation to spend more time on thinking about different ways to reinvent its business model leaving the origin of the best ideas for its technology for its products to be developed outside. Small and big companies are learning it.

There is no time wasting on trial-and-error sort of problems most of R&D companies departments normally pass through on its day-by-day attempt to develop new products or needed solutions. The company posts its challenges on the Market Place along with some guidance of what it is searching for solution, set accomplishment time line and the prize for the winner. Only the solver who come up with the solution that accomplished company’s query gets its award.

Advantages of the use of Open Innovation by companies or Non-Profit Organizations can be long listed as described below:

Creating and capturing value ahead of the competition
Reduce the risk of innovation
Less risk guessing what the market wants
Let the market / community tell you what they want
Integrated community innovation
Innovation can come from anywhere and anyone
Some of the best ideas are outside of your organization
Lower your R&D and operating costs
Supplement your R&D
Tap into the virtual R&D community
Shared IP can create a formidable barrier to entry

This is a pathway to companies to maximize the dollars they have got for Marketing and Research and Development.

From the suppliers’ point of view, where individuals will sell products to companies, it is established a completely new and inverted position on commercial relationship. A broad world of opportunity is open to their inventive minds. They have just sign in, with no cost, to the web site and search for puzzles posted. Normally it is posted as questions to be answered followed or not by a few formulas or scratches. Professionals who have found no rooms to show their abilities on its own place of work can be the source of a brilliant solution for a much bigger company that the one he works for, besides he can raise good cash as a competition winner. This is a place for everyone shows its inventiveness.

As a sort of Ebay of Ideas, Open Innovation adheres to the laws of globalization. Noticeably large numbers of Russians and Indians participate in InnoCentive's competitions, for example. For them, the prize money can often mean an entire year's salary. Professional recognition achievement is also an outcome normally as important as financial awards.

Creative thinkers, engineers, scientists, inventors, and business people with expertise in life sciences, engineering, chemistry, math, computer science, and entrepreneurship can join the InnoCentive Solvers™ community to solve some of the world's toughest challenges”.

The downside for solvers lays on the secrecy on which businesses insist to protect intellectual-property rights, they are not able to know anything beside whether they won or lost. Losers' knowledge isn't widely shared.

Non-Profit Organization such as Rockefeller Foundation has become partner of InnoCentive, aiming to expand its capacity to invest its philanthropic funding in a broader community of scientists. Rockefeller Foundation is one example among several others Non-Profit entities which has adopted the model of web scale searching for inventive answers to a few specifics human common challenges they have catch as proper goals to solve.

The same way Open Innovation works for companies (clients) it works for these entities. The web platform posting problems, along with appropriate awards, are open to a much larger community of possible thinkers and problem solvers while reduce cost and risks of non success for Philanthropy. Only the successful response gets its prize.

Also, InnoCentive Seekers and Solvers are anonymous. The judgment is based on the sciences, not on who is standing behind it.

As nothing can be really perfect, this new form of R&D cost-cutting has its problems, too, as Frank Piller, a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has discovered: "Some full-time researchers, apparently worried about losing their own jobs, are intentionally flooding online innovation marketplaces with unsolvable problems, in order to frustrate their competitors on the Internet."


Groups served
The customers’ group served is wider as the number of companies and Non- Profit Organizations existing around the world. Non-Profit entities have entered in this market more as partner of the web platform companies. The hottest start-ups and handful of innovative Fortune 500 companies are just a few to mention, among many others, who understand that some of the best ideas come from the outside.
Adopting the Open Innovation model is just something that organizations should not only be discussing but aggressively adopting.

As well as for customers, suppliers can be as large as to the extent of the human being who can have internet access. No need to be a Star Rocket scientist, anyone can be inventive. The people who use a particular product are often the better experts, simply as a result of daily use. However, it is not a physics law and surprising results can really come from anyone.

After examining 166 problems posted by 26 research labs on the InnoCentive site over four years, Karim Lakhani, a Harvard Business School professor, found 240 people, on average, examined each problem, 10 offered answers and 29.5% of the problems were solved.
One surprise: The further the problem was from a solver's expertise, the more likely he or she was to solve it. It turns out that outsiders look through a completely different lens. Toxicologists were stumped by the significance of pathology observed in a study; within weeks after broadcasting it, a Ph.D. in crystallography offered a solution that hadn't occurred to them.

Around 80,000 inventors have already tried their hand at solving the various problems posted on InnoCentive.


Source of Revenues
InnoCentive has only one visible source of revenues. The web site charges the companies and the Non-Profit Organizations a fee to post their challenges. In return, they remain anonymous, in order to protect organizations secrets.
It is not totally clear if the partnership with Rockefeller Foundation generates extra income other than the mentioned fee posted by them on the site.


Sustainability and Scalability of the model
New technology start-ups companies have making use of Open Innovation business model involving internet as part of their core strategy to come to the market. The number of Fortune 500 companies which has adopts the now so-called crowdsourcing has seen remarkable growth. Wikipedia defines Crowdsourcing as “a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.

For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine an algorithm or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data”, which is basically what InnoCentive provides through its created web platform. Some examples of companies who are embracing open Innovations as intelligence source.
Apple
Google
Amazon
Zimbra
Meebo
Skype
Salesforce.com
Eli Lilly
P&G (Procter & Gamble)
BASF
DuPont
Dow Chemical
General Mills
Kimberly-Clark
GSK (Glaxo Smith Kline)

Even companies which have crowdsourcing as a normal source to new technologies, the use of it is growing fast. Alan Lafley, CEO of P&G and one of the most admired CEOs in the world, proclaims, as he did in 2003, that “50 percent of all P&G discovery and invention could come from outside the company”. This is even more remarkable when you think that only one-fifth of P&G’s R&D came from the outside in 2002.

Clearly some of these new initiatives reflect the commercial viability of open innovation and business models. In the early days, most open source projects had no commercial intent. Also is interest to remark that a handful of companies like Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com found it strategically advantageous to use free open source software (FOSS) for their own infrastructure. Now, the perception of the need of being more “open to innovations” lead companies to thrown away old believes regarding creating its own IP as it is not a determinant or a pre-requisite for success.

According to Kameran Ahari, an information technology e-marketing and strategy consultant, “75% to 95% of patented technologies stay on the shelf and go to waste. Not to mention the fact that 90% of all products fail. Moreover, if your IP management policy prohibits reassignment, then your patents are not assets. With rising technology development costs and increasingly shorter product life cycles, the risk of innovation is almost certain. Technology life cycle has gone from 4-5 years, from a decade ago, to 6-9 months. In other words, your window of opportunity to recoup your investment got even shorter. Having your innovation, business model, and community aligned is more important”.

The crowdsourcing model itself neither it’s not new nor did not born on internet. “In 1714, Britain offered £20,000 (roughly equivalent to £2.5 million, or $5 million, today) for a way for mariners to determine their longitude. Sir Isaac Newton was convinced the solution lay in astronomy. He was wrong: John Harrison, a working-class joiner with little formal education, built a clock that did the job. In 1919, hotel owner Raymond Orteig offered $25,000 for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris. Eight years later, Charles Lindbergh won”.

“Prizes prompt a lot of effort, far more than any sponsor could devote itself, but they generally pay only for success. That's "an important piece of shifting risk from inside the walls of the company and moving it out to the solver community," says Jill Panetta, InnoCentive's chief scientific officer.

Repeating what was previously stated which summarizes the perception of the future and sustainability of the Open Innovation model, “Adopting the Open Innovation model is just something that organizations should not only be discussing but aggressively adopting”.


Stretching
The increase of users or customers are already growing fast, however I would expand platforms capabilities to reach people native from countries different of English, French or Spanish spoken. The limited use of these languages restrain access to people who is as inventive as others but without abilities to understand the challenges in other language rather than your own.

I would develop a team with very special languages skills to make fair translations to spread out the challenges bring many other possible solvers to this Market Place.

I couldn’t see revenues coming from advertising. Initially, I supposed that companies which seek for crowdsourcing would not like to see its image related to a web site which provides this sort of solution. It might harm its image of technical competence. However, as many major companies are clearly declaring its strategies towards crowdsourcing, I would invest in selling advertising through my site. Also, partnership with Non-profit Organizations could utilise its relationship in a more publicly form by advertising its achievements such as success on challenges, cost reductions on the search for answers and the enlargement of public taking part of its challenges.

I believe that the expansion of challenges to new language solvers will attract new customers from many other countries which are also restrained by language limits. The growth of the existing market can come faster along with as the world for solutions has expanded as well.


Other industries in Open Innovation market
Beyond regular high tech companies, which in its desperate search for new discoveries spend millions of dollars to keep up-to-date with market demands and ahead of its competitors’ fast movements, many sort of companies which is in the fast-paced industries can take advantage of the Open Innovation source of solutions.

A great market for Open Innovation is on the marketing sector. Marketing companies might post challenges to outsourcing inventive people to find solutions to every task of its own work, like products and logo designs, digital graphics solutions and many others.

Another example come from the fashion industry; the Chicago-based company Threadless prints T-shirts that its designs are based on ideas people submit to its web site. Only the designs that win the most votes actually make it onto the company's T-shirts. The winners receive a $1,000 reward and a tiny shot at fame. The competition gives young designers the opportunity to make a name for them, while helping Threadless to cut down on flops -as well as employees.

Social Entrepreneurship - a world changing tool

According to Eckhart Tolle in his best-seller book, “The Power of Now”;‘Humanity is sick’. What Mr. Tolle meant saying this is that each of every single person born as a complete human being fulfill by the whole spiritual truth, a complete sense of life, full of goodness and knowing what pathway he should take in his lifetime to elevate himself on spiritual evolution process.

When, this complete self-contained being, grows as a human entity surrounded by people widely developed by distorted truths, prejudices, twisted values and, as consequence of it all mixed, with very poor or with lack of the original goodness, he start its own process of losing his real inner being. He reaches up his adult life as sick as everyone else who couldn’t see this process growing within him. He ends up full of prejudices, twisted values, etc, etc, etc.

As a sick society, we believe that a successful life is displayed by having expensive cars, luxury products, big mansions and many others enviable consumer goods. Behind all of this comes the money. By extrapolation, who has succeed financially in his life is a person who also achieved happiness. This is the strongest expression of misunderstanding of life’s sense. Unfortunately, just a small number of people worldwide have jumped off this trail and search for happiness through different pathways.

This said story is the base of why “Corporate scandals and excessive compensation packages for rapacious CEOs have dominated business news during the past three years. Profiles of visionary corporate heroes have given way to cautionary tales about greedy villains, and public trust in business has plummeted” as cited by Laura D'Andrea Tyson, dean of London Business School, in her article ‘Good Works - With A Business Plan’ on Businessweek in may 2004. After found themselves lost on the happiness life search, people aim to achieve such distant state of mind, by making the more money they can, no matter the cost it might take for their health, their families, their friendships and frequently stepping over anything that might slightly being seen as a harm on their mad pursuit.

As we’ve been seen recently an increasingly movement toward social responsibilities actions taken by corporations, should we believe it is a transitory trend or a real behavioral shift? It is hard to answer this question as no one has a crystal ball to read the future. It seems to me that as the number of people being enlightened by new believes, detached from the pursuit of wealth, are clearly growing, we may be seen a real, not only corporate behavioral shifting, but a society as a whole entire changing.

The corporate behavioral changing is only happening as a cause of society's claim(playing its role as part of the enlightening process). However it's still hard to predict what is going to happen with these new truths and believes humanity is showing now. Major events, such as petrol war, ethnic manslaughter and other ugly actions might throw back in time society’s evolution reached to date. On the other side, the expanding perception of how badly men had treated the mother earth causing great and scaring risk to humanity future can accelerate the expected behavioral changing, reducing the risk of negative major events. Such scenario will strongly support society and corporations onto a major behavioral shifting during next few years. We must all do our part on the game as a small, but not least, part of this still sick society, demanding and acting responsibly in our own life or when we are playing as corporate representative. The change will always depend on our own attitudes.

In a more formal definition Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change. Social Entrepreneurs are a more visible example of people who seek for career success achieving key positions but who decide to make their own part to society’s shifting onto a better living world.

As I consider myself an incorrigible optimistic l incline to believe this corporate changing is for real starting a win-win humanity game.

Ventes Privées - Le phénomène

The Private Sales concept has popped up recently as another e-business opportunity of purchases and sales. The difference it brought to others e-commerce sites lays on the need of each party be invited to enter as a member of a private network. The sponsorship system is very similar to Orkut, the first successful e-platform created to increase and narrow relationship worldwide. Basically a sponsor, who might be a seller or another purchaser, already member in the network, invites a third party to join the group. As a full registered member everyone is entitled to receive by e-mail all information on good deals offered by all kind of stores and web sites promoting best deals over internet.

The phenomenon has gathered momentum with the explosion of e-commerce. The sites of private sales are proliferating in fields as varied as fashion or the appliance industry. The principles are always the same: to offer, under a limited period of time, high discount rates over articles mainly of renowned brands.



Benefits
Regarding the unquestionable success achieved by this sort of trading benefits are being profited by both sides. For customers, eager to consume good quality products from famous brands, at a highly discounted prices and being noticed in advance and privately apart them from ordinary buyers. It is a luxury for those who are not keen to pay what famous brands charges for its products. Also there is a group of customers who don’t like to go shopping searching for Shops Sales. It is definitely unpleasant entering into a crowded store and get close to fight against others customers for the last available desired items. Also, this process of trading attracts those who like to feel they are part of something special as a private network suggests. Besides them, everyone who gets an invitation from a sponsor can get benefit from the Private Sales system.

On the other hand, producers have an extensive network of consumers just waiting to be advised of their sales through this e-shopping channel to clean up its inventories of old collections or just to reduce its size of inventory (the inventory keeping cost might be higher than sell it for a low price), depending on the sort of articles we are talking about.

In order to connect these 2 avid extremities web shops have proliferated offering e-platforms and strong marketing strategies to narrow the size of this trading wire. They are profiting of the situation mostly by getting commissions over each sale. Also, websites get revenues coming from customers’ subscriptions and advertising. Some websites have developed extra source of revenues by using the private network to market other sort of deals, even gathering donation to unprivileged people in developing countries. I suppose they charge commissions over these funding raises as well.

The idea has achieved this tremendous success because it is good for everyone. All parties have a benefit to take from this business, as long as each part does correctly its role on the chain. There are growing concerns on legal aspects of this sort of trading as most of countries don’t count on up to date legal system for open e-business relationship the more for private networking deals to protect customers’ rights.

The Private Sales model
In spite of the fact the remarkable success of this trading model has been based on the existence of numerous e-platforms available, this model might be, and I believe it should be, adopted by “brick and mortar” stores. Most of big stores or renowned brands have its own data over its clients. Having such powerful tool they should split the annual or semi-annual Sales between ordinary customers and special customers. The latter might be invited to enter into a selected group of clients that would be informed in advance of special sales and would have preferred time sessions to profit of all benefits coming from the Sales before non-private-networking clients. These procedures might increase interests from its special customers to be more present (and to buy more) of each Special Sales. In terms of scale, it can go as big as the size of the retail market worldwide. Big retail chains stores, famous brands with self stores and others can make use of this strategy to enter this new world of opportunities.

Stretching
It is a quite tricky strategy expanding your internet marketing actions without facing the risk of becoming or to be seen more as a spammer rather than a serious trader. There is no internet user who amuses himself of getting spams all the time. It is easier to get an enemy instead of a costumer if a very selective marketing strategy is not appropriated adopted.

In order to increase my own sales l would invest on knowing my clients better. Regular customers use to respond to researches (as long as it is short and not boring) if they see any further compensation. The major cost of marketing l would invest would be in creating this compensation programs in order to enlarge as much as possible the data bank with my customers’ information; and the Data Bank Software itself. That would make difference to understand how to reach each of their weaknesses, desires, financial capabilities, consumption interests, and many other power information which might be explored towards consumption motivation. It might re-direct my sales efforts to other products or to add services, by instance.

The growth of users and revenues would come naturally by knowing for real what my portfolio of clients seek instead of pushing products that l would like to see my clients buying. Moreover, this growth would enhance my ability to negotiate with suppliers that are still not in my list but should be as their name was captured by my Clients’ Data Bank Analysis Software.

Vente Privées Links

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