The Lost Ring

Innovation At The Economist – 10 Lessons For Teams

furai86 — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:52:10 +0000

In April 2006, when its Internet Strategy Group met to discuss ways of improving the company’s presence on the Internet, The Economist was doing very nicely, thank you. Global circulation had just passed one million; Roll Call, a sister magazine, had become the most widely read publication in the US Congress; and new titles had been successfully launched in China and India.

All in all, it was a time when most companies might have been happy to build on what they’d got. Instead, The Economist approved a proposal from their CIO, Mike Seery, to recruit a team of five people plus himself from within the Group, remove them from their current jobs, and give them £100,000 and six months to launch an innovative web-based product, service or business model.

The enthusiastic young team encountered all kinds of problems and challenges. Many would be immediately recognised by any innovation team. The solutions they found were often ingenious and the lessons they learned could be applied in thousands of businesses around the world.

In a rare move, The Economist team invited me into their offices to observe them at work over the next six months. Here’s the condensed version of what I saw and learnt – for teamworkers, innovators and other readers in a hurry.

Team selection
Mike Seery recruited his fellow team members from across The Economist Group. He set out to attract people from editorial, sales, marketing and IT. He also managed to bring team members from around the world to the London-based project.

But gathering team members from such different backgrounds meant they had a lot of catching up to do before they were able to work together efficiently. For a long time, the techies’ knowledge of emerging technologies left some of the others floundering. And a lot of team-building needed to be done before the business of team-working could get under way.

The Economist also kept open each team member’s job for the six months that they were on Project Red Stripe, and team members were recruited on the understanding that this wasn’t an opportunity for people who were bored with their jobs or wanting to leave.

Lesson 1:
Consider carefully whether it’s better to bring together a team who already know each other, share a common professional language and have skills in common – and then buy-in extra skills as needed. Or do you prefer a broad knowledge-base but allow extra time for team members to get used to each other?

Lesson 2:
Recruiting team members who want to return to their old jobs at the end of the project ensures that you don’t just get people who are bored with their work. But loyal employees are not necessarily the most creative. The angry and disaffected may have some of the best ideas.

Crowdsourcing
Although team members brought their own ideas about what The Economist should do next, they began by asking readers and other interested parties. In so doing, they put their faith in ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’. In fact, ‘the crowd’ didn’t come up with anything the team hadn’t already thought of. So you could argue that the time they spent crowdsourcing was time wasted. But what if they had come up with something spectacular that way? How would you ever know without asking?

Lesson 3:
Think very carefully about who is best placed to identify the best innovation for your organisation. Is it you and your team? Your customers? Experts? Or the world at large?

Freedom
The team had enormous freedom. There were no guidelines on what sort of innovation they should look for and they were free to launch the idea without first getting approval from the directors. In practice this caused a lot of headaches and the team weren’t willing to jeopardise the business by launching an idea they believed in without first getting approval from the top. And, when they asked for approval, they didn’t get it.

Too much freedom can also cause problems with creativity. The Project Red Stripe team could do anything. At one point, they were working with top NGOs and their advisers to develop a business that would help the UN achieve one of its millennium goals. When world peace is within your grasp, why would you consider a humdrum, commercial web venture?

Lesson 4:
Be realistic about how much freedom you can give an innovation team. It may turn into a millstone.

Lesson 5:
‘Thinking big’ is necessary for a major innovation project, especially as it’s notoriously difficult to get people to think outside the box. But giving people the freedom to try and change the world may leave them dazed by the enormity of what they might achieve.

Risk
Big companies are large because they’re successful and success is a barrier to innovation. Why try something new and risky when what you’re doing now works? If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

This was true at The Economist, which didn’t need a new business and didn’t need the two key ideas developed by Project Red Stripe.

Lesson 6:
Do a risk assessment. Is the sponsor organisation under sufficient pressure to want to run with whatever idea the team comes up with?

Teambuilding
Early on, Mike Seery organised a number of teambuilding exercises. They worked well and were seen as significant moments in the team’s history and in the stories that it told about itself. But they also served to establish a particular mindset – ‘we’re good at this and this, but less good at that’.

Lesson 7:
The moments in a team’s trajectory when you most need to run team-building exercises (late on, when the team’s under extreme pressure) are, almost by definition, the moments when you haven’t got time to run them.

Drifting
From the outset, the Red Stripe team sometimes ‘wandered around’ without a clear sense of what was going to happen next and without clear rules about how it might be going to happen.

Instinctively, drifting seems like an appropriate thing for an innovation team to do; but it’s also an uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing thing to do. Some say that safety is a prerequisite of creativity. Certainly there were some members of the Red Stripe team who worked hardest and fastest when they knew where they were going.

Lesson 8:
Drifting ‘aimlessly’ can be creative, but it’s also scary. Participants (and Finance Directors) may want something more regimented. Rules and guidelines can offer direction or serve as blinkers. It may be important to have some clear guidelines in place before the innovation project begins.

Consensus
Most teams are likely to want to act democratically and move forward with general agreement that they’re on the right lines. In Project Red Stripe, different team members grew committed to different projects. That made getting a consensus for just one idea difficult.

Lesson 9:
Consider whether you should opt for ideas that excite everybody or simply for ones that command a majority. If you can’t find an idea that excites everybody, for how long should you keep looking?

Markets
An obvious question for any innovation team is whether to start by thinking about the problems faced by a particular group of people, or whether to think about improving existing products, services and skills. Theorists tend to prefer the former, but plenty of great innovations come out of companies finding new applications for existing technologies. (Think of classic innovations like 3M and Post-It Notes or NASA and Teflon).

While the Project Red Stripe team actively solicited ideas about what they should do, they did not solicit ideas about the group(s) for whom they should implement those ideas. Should they have invited an archbishop, an aid worker, a genetic researcher and others to pitch for a particular target market?

Lesson 10:
A deserving market may be motivational, even inspirational. But it doesn’t necessarily make for good business. The team may need guidelines for how to value a commercial priority against an ethical one in business.

The Economist’s Project Red Stripe succeeded in that it came up with a number of radical and innovative business proposals. It failed in that the company chose not to commercialise any of them at the time. It also succeeded in that it offered the business powerful learnings about its culture and about future innovation projects – just a few of which are shared here and may provide food for thought for other innovation teams around the globe.

Rae Hoffman aka Sugarrae PubCon 2008 Affiliate Marketing Tips Video Interview

furai86 — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:05:49 +0000

from www.searchengineworld.com At the most recent PubCon conference in Las Vegas SearchEngineWorld video content producer Vanessa Zamora had the opportunity to spend some time with Rae Hoffman, who is the founder and principal of Internet consulting company Sugarrae SEO Consulting.

Rae Hoffman aka Sugarrae PubCon 2008 Affiliate Marketing Tips Video Interview

furai86 — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:05:49 +0000

Online Marketing Presence: Key Strategy to Lay the Foundation and Build a Successful Business

furai86 — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:04:29 +0000

Most of us think that it is not possible to build a successful business over internet without quitting their regular job. Fortunately, this is not true and the reality is that it is absolutely possible to create an online marketing presence while working. But the most important thing here is that before establishing an internet business; you must give yourself at least a year for getting online exposure. Once you have done it, you are all set to lay down the foundation of your internet venture. It is essential to be online in order to get success in the virtual world or you will have to struggle too much. So, keep on reading this article to know more about how to build a successful business and online marketing presence.

The very first step for starting is to establish your own business instead of becoming a reseller. Take some simple steps like jumping into services instead of manufacturing, starting at a local level instead of national or international. Do everything step by step and do not try to make big leaps just in beginning. The reason behind it is that it will help you get ready for a bigger campaign in future. Moreover, your competitors would not realize that you are coming to hit them. To make your online marketing presence, you must lay down its foundation on Google. So, follow these directions to do it in a right way.

1. Never choose a company name after your own name. Instead, select a name according to your business and follow the similar fashion for picking the domain name too. It is important because if you will pick the domain after your own name, it will be difficult to bring traffic on your site and hence more time will be taken to build a successful business online. It is always better to use .com domains, as these are the most common one. Try to keep the domain name shorter so that Google can recognize it and people can remember it.

2. Use proper keywords. To brand your company on Google, start with long tail keywords that include at least 4 to 5 words. For example, if your targeted keyword is “mountain tours” or “climbing tours” and your company is based in California, you can consider starting with “California mountain climbing tours” or “California guided mountain tours” or something similar. Once you have established your online marketing presence on these keywords, you can jump for shorter keywords.

3. Gaining backlinks is another important step of building a successful business. If you are not much familiar with this, take help from hundreds of articles and resources available on internet. Once you get acquainted with enough knowledge, gradually start the process of link building. The best way to do is to submit your website to major web directories. Yahoo and Business.com are one of the best known web directories. Then establish a blog and make frequent but informative posts on it. Finally move on to article writing and submit them to huge article directories like Ezine. Make sure that your articles are perfectly written and proofread before submission.

4. Keep a track of your page rank. Once you are done with all above activities, your site traffic will being to increase and your Google page rank will jump high. As your site will get popular, more and more number of people will start contacting you through the website, which is extremely important.

It is not as easy as you will always face some hurdles in the beginning. But do not worry as this is a part of every business. So, take correct steps towards establishing a foundation of your online marketing presence and build a successful business in virtual world.

Think Like an Owner and Explode Your Home-based Business

furai86 — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:44:43 +0000

Unless you’ve made millions of dollars from selling your product or service yourself, you have no right to go out and promise people that you can teach them how to make millions. In order to be successful in Network Marketing, one must learn to manage by the mind and lead by the heart. This comes from thinking like an owner instead of an employee.

It’s great that lots of people have come before you and made money for themselves, but don’t focus on them. When you paint a picture based on someone elses’ vision and success, you are positioning them as a leader and you as a follower. You always want people to know you are in control of your own business.

Align yourself to where you are really at by being authentic. More people will want to follow your lead if you are honest, even though you may not yet be successful. When you think like an owner, you have a clear vision of where you want to go and your current status isn’t going to matter to someone wanting to share that vision.

The first thing an owner comes to terms with is the fact that no product sells itself. Your results sell it. Whether you’ve made money or not, your passion about your product or service is what makes the difference between success and failure. If you are not totally committed to what you endorse, no one will believe you when you tell them how great it is.

That being said, if your product and company are so great, why do they need you to sell their products? Network marketing companies are looking for people to find others with a specific need. Unfortunately, they tell you to go out and spread their gospel to the masses when the reality is that the masses are not your targeted audience.

This is how distributors get roped into joining online business systems that promote turn-key systems that rely on your money to get things moving. You don’t have to depend on anyone to grow your own business. If you do, you’re not thinking like an owner. You’re thinking like a cog in someone else’s giant wheel of success.

People will start asking questions when you become successful, so forget outdated techniques like trying to persuade people you know. This is the same thing as following someone else’s plan that doesn’t work. There’s much less drama focusing on cold leads and building your skill set so that you are ready when you finally find your target audience.

When it comes to education, thinking like an owner means seeking proper marketing education if what you are learning from your parent company isn’t working. You could quit your business if you aren’t getting the results you want after 90 days, but that would be something an employee would do.

In network marketing, you can’t just blame the company and move on to the next with the same skill set and expect something different to happen. They’re all basically the same, so the people who succeed have developed the mindset of a leader who takes it upon him or herself to learn the basic principles of marketing.

I always get a kick out of people who get excited about the latest fad a company comes up with to generate excitement among its distributors. What they are doing is jumping from one idea to the next based on someone’s success that they don’t even know. I’ve done it all…sample packages, home parties, clubs, fancy websites, expensive leads. They come and go as often as the seasons of the year because they fail to get to the core of marketing.

Mastering the telephone and knowing how to find and communicate with your target audience is all you need. It’s not easy to do without a great deal of practice, but what great things come with ease? Owners are able to think outside of the box because they think like leaders. They recognize that it is all about getting down to the basics.

Thinking like an owner is not easy if all you are looking to do is follow the lead of others. There is a 95% drop-out rate in network marketing because people are unwilling to take charge of their own business. Don’t follow the rich person just because they have more money. Think like an owner and create a desire for others to want to follow you.

Green Business Marketing

furai86 — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 08:55:24 +0000

‘Going green‘ is not simply a trend. It is a smart decision on the part of business houses and consumers to reduce adverse environmental impacts. Contrary to general belief, green solutions are also economically viable. A study conducted by IPSOS, the world’s largest research organization, stated that 79% of the consumers in the US, the UK, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, China and Spain would rather purchase from companies that deal in green products. Not for no reason has green business marketingbecome immensely popular.

What is Green Business Marketing?

The process of selling anything, be it products or services, that accrue environmental benefits is termed as green business marketing. Such products or services can be manufactured in an environment-friendly way, can themselves be green products or be packaged by a similar method. The main assumption of adopting this strategy is that potential consumers will perceive the product’s ‘greenness’ as a plus point and base their purchase decision on it.

Selecting Green Business Marketing Company

Nowadays, green business marketing has become a strategy that almost every company adds to enhance their brand image. If a company is competitive in terms of prices, quality, performance, adding a green label is believed to be effective in raising sales. Therefore, it is crucial to be careful about purchasing products from companies that genuinely deal in green items, rather than those that just claim to be green.

The following are some factors that can help one recognize the genuine from among the fakes:

Review the corporate policies: The policies of the company must be consistent with the kind of products produced as well as their manufacturing techniques. If the company claims to be selling green products, ensure that it has established the environmental credentials to do so.

Educating customers: Select a company that is open about its policies and is ready to share information about the green production process. It is not enough to be environment-friendly. Customers must enquire into the company’s objective behind being ‘green’. Most of such information must be mentioned on their website. However, one can even enquire from their customer care department.

Offers customer participation: It will prove beneficial to look for a company that allows customer participation. This will make the company actions more transparent, while letting customers participate in positive environmental activities.

Online Debt Management ? a Technological Panacea for Financial Burdens

furai86 — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 08:10:16 +0000

In today’s world, our finances can get out of our control from time to time, compelling us to take loans from the market. But due to some unavoidable circumstances, these loans may pile up and become a worry for us. To manage your debt better and efficiently the solution is online debt management.

Understanding the nitty-gritty:

Online Debt Management is a service available online that looks for all your multiple debts and provides a proper way to deal with your debts. This service saves your time for search of suitable lender. It is an easy tool of search for your desired loan deal. Online debt management avails different debt management program to different persons considering his or her repayment capacity, credit history. It even considers his or her income and saving. It also takes into account the degree of debt problem faced b him or her.

The Features:

Online debt management service includes a number of elements like debt negotiation, debt consolidation and debt counseling, etc. Each one has its own importance and goes hand in hand to achieve the ultimate goal of your debt free life. Starting with debt negotiation, where the service providers negotiate with your lenders for lowest possible interest rates, on your behalf. Secondly, debt consolidation combines all your scattered debts together under a single lender. Thirdly, debt counseling is an important service where credit experts suggest you the ways of getting rid of debt problem. The credit experts first study the borrower’s complete financial situation and then give him the most suited and correct advice. These are some of the features unique to online debt management services.

Your steps:

With the Internet the debt management services can be availed on fingertips as per the borrower’s comfort like office or a home. The borrower just needs to log onto different websites offering assistance to all the borrowers having multiple debts. All that is needed to be done is to fill an online application form with your personal details that would inform various lenders in finance market about your debt problem and finally online debt management service approaches you with their loan offers that suits your budget.

Austin CVB: Tourism is important key to Austin’s economy

furai86 — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 06:18:51 +0000

Austin CVB: Tourism is important key to Austin’s economy
Did you know that travel and tourism in Minnesota now generates $11.2 billion in gross sales every year? And it also generates $695 million in state sales tax annually.

CREATIVITY,INNOVATION,ENTERPRENEURSHIP

furai86 — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:50:44 +0000

INTRODUCTION:

“Entrepreneur is a person who habitually creates and innovates to build something of recognized value around perceived opportunities”

When people pursue opportunities to achieve personal goals and to realize personal ideals, entrepreneurship comes into being. Entrepreneurship is what drives human lives to change for the better because entrepreneurs put their theoretical innovations into practice. Indeed, entrepreneurship is the result of combining personal creativity and business innovation. Under the drive of business innovation and entrepreneurship, intelligence and innovation are, therefore, invigorated to brighten human lives. All blockbuster products and services are first born of creative ideas. Also, at a time when traditional jobs are disappearing, you will be more likely to recognize and profit from new opportunities. Here are some suggestions for fostering ingenuity.

Successful new products are usually associated with `idea-centric’ creativity. The greater the number of creative and relevant ideas put forward, the more likely it is that successful new products will emerge. And real-life experiences often help to anchor and focus creativity for maximizing the number of actionable new product ideas that can be generated.

The Essence of Entrepreneurship

“Entrepreneurs” are often thought of as persons who start new business venturesInnovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship.

Today many people like to become an entrepreneur and also they have innovative idea which can change the India.

India, the largest democracy of the World, with about a sixth of the World’s Human Resource, boasts of huge pool of people aged over twenty and under thirty – the age at which most entrepreneurs start off. India also has it’s strengths in it’s diversity, it’s faith in equality and freedom. In short India has a huge potential for innovation and entrepreneurship. It’s just a matter of channeling the resources appropriately, before it is unleashed.

The world is facing the twin challenges of youth unemployment and environmental degradation – this presents an exciting opportunity to engage young people as social and environmental entrepreneurs, building a society that can live within planetary boundaries.

Colleges play a far greater role in the society than just being centres of knowledge transfer and exchange. College may be likened to a workshop where characters, and therefore societies and in-turn nations, are carved. Attitudes and Habits, good or bad, picked up in college, stick with you for life – by default. They hold the power to make or break a nation. It is therefore, required of colleges and other educational institutions to cultivate the habit of innovation, within themselves and in their students. Colleges need to promote and reward innovation

Barriers to Innovation:

Management’s resistance to innovative ideas is one of the main reasons so many entrepreneurs just give up.

1. Short Term Focus: They are only concerned about short term performance .Besides most significant innovations take a long time to come to market, and the leader is likely to be long gone before that happens.

2. Leadership (or lack thereof). They really don’t understand that leaders take responsibility for both long term and short term performance, and hence aren’t really leaders.

3. Surviving against Intense Competition. There won’t be a tomorrow if the company can’t compete today, and hence all available resources need to be focused on carving out a sustainable competitive position in order to generate — eventually — the extra resources for investing in innovation.

4. Fear of failure / fear of uncertainty. They don’t know how to manage / lead in the domain of innovation, and are trapped by their own competence related to management in mainstream operations. They stay within their own comfort zone.

5. Lack of bandwidth. The company doesn’t (yet) have a system for supporting innovation and the management simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to take on the challenge.

6. Lack of confidence in the innovator. They have many activities competing for limited resources and — like venture capitalists — choose to invest in innovators in whom they have confidence. Perhaps the innovator who seeks but fails to gain support doesn’t have the knowledge, skills and attitudes that generate confidence in the minds of the management.

CREATIVITY

Creativity is marked by the ability to create, bring into existence, to invent into a new form, to produce through imaginative skill, to make to bring into existence something new. Creativity is not ability to create out of nothing (only God can do that), but the ability to generate new ideas by combining, changing, or reapplying existing ideas. Some creative ideas are astonishing and brilliant, while others are just simple, good practical ideas that no one seems to have thought, of yet. Creativity requires passion and commitment.

The action and result of imagination and ingenuity; the ability to create through the relation of previously unrelated ideas or things; the application of a person’s mental ability and curiousity to discover something new.

Innovation: The introduction of something new; the development of new processes, methods, devices, products, and services for a useful purpose.

Entrepreneurship: The pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled; the process of creating value through unique resource combinations to exploit opportunity; the implementation of innovation; the utilization of the skill sets, qualities and characteristics inherent in, or acquired by, entrepreneurs.

CHARACTERISTICS OF AN ENTREPRENEUR

The entrepreneur has an enthusiastic vision, the driving force of an enterprise.

The entrepreneur’s vision is usually supported by an interlocked collection of specific ideas not available to the marketplace.

The overall blueprint to realize the vision is clear, however details may be incomplete, flexible, and evolving.

The entrepreneur promotes the vision with enthusiastic passion.

With persistence and determination, the entrepreneur develops strategies to change the vision into reality.

The entrepreneur takes the initial responsibility to cause a vision to become a success.

Entrepreneurs take prudent risks. They assess costs, market/customer needs and persuade others to join and help.

An entrepreneur is usually a positive thinker and a decision maker.

An entrepreneur has inspiration, motivation and sensibility.

ADVANTAGES OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Enormous personal financial gain

Self-employment, own bossing, offering more job satisfaction and flexibility of the work force

Employment for others, often in better jobs

Development of more industries, especially in rural areas or regions disadvantaged by economic changes, for example due to globalization effects

Income generation and increased economic growth

Healthy competition thus encourages higher quality products

More goods and services available

Development of new markets

Freedom from the dependency on the jobs offered by others

Ability to have great accomplishments

Reduction of the informal economy

Emigration of talent may be stopped by a better domestic entrepreneurship climate

Serious tax advantages

DISADVANTAGES:

• Salary: Starting your own business means that you must be willing to give up the security of a regular paycheck.

• Benefits: There will undoubtedly be fewer benefits, especially when considering that your business will be just starting off.

• Work schedule: The work schedule of an entrepreneur is never predictable; an emergency can come up in a matter of a second and late hours will have to be put in.

• Administration: All the decisions of the business must be made on your own; there is no one ranked higher than you on the chain of command in YOUR business.

• Incompetent staff: Often times, you will find yourself working with an employee who “doesn’t know the ropes” as well as you do due to lack of experience.

• Procedures: Many times during your entrepreneurial life, you will find that many policies do not make sense, nor will they ever make sense

CONCLUSION:

Entrepreneurship is no longer seen as being solely applicable to people to start enterprises but to people involved in any endeavor. It is therefore important to introduce entrepreneurship into the school system as a means of changing attitudes and creating wider awareness in the society, so that people can play a more positive role in developing their own well being. It is essential to motivate the youths to become self-employed even when they are studying in schools and colleges. In fact, entrepreneurship development is one of the most integral parts of human development, and in recent time there is an urgent need to find a place in the curriculum of all institutions and colleges. Since education is an integral part of society, society would like to benefit from its outcomes like good academic performance and personalities which contribute for the betterment of society. A constructive way of contributing to society is by developing entrepreneurial skills.

The History of the Video Game Industry

furai86 — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:35:26 +0000

Video game industry is one of the most upcoming industries nowadays. Speaking precisely it is the economic sector involved with the development, marketing and sale of video game. Formally known as interactive entertainment industry, it provides entertainment to a large number of people and also provides a variety of job opportunities in various disciplines. Now it is supposed to the largest industry that has greater sales even more than the sales of Hollywood.

History

William Higinbotham can be regarded as the father of video games. He created the first recorded video game only. The game Tennis For Two was on an experimental basis and was never commercially released. This laid down the platform, which gradually formed into a hobby culture. With the growth of availability of personal computers the industry has grown manifolds. The industry also advanced with the advancement in the computing technology. The video game industry has a momentum of its own and profit from this industry still drives the technology which is further used by other industries. The video game industry is very volatile and as there are a lot of third party game developers cropping up and getting out of business very quickly, the industry has grown matured still remaining volatile.

Video games like any other industry also has certain practice that characterizes other entertainment industries also. However lately there has been a lot of hue and cry that the video game industry is underestimating the developing talents and is poorly treating them. This has led to the development of independent developers because of which the video game industry has not gained any definite shape. However the practices followed within the industry are: –

1. Breakaways One of the major practices that are being followed in the video game industry is the custom of breakaways. As the video game industry doesn’t pay any attention to the budding game developers and treat them very badly so there are a large number of breakaways in this industry. One of the brightest examples in this regard is the independent video game developer Activision.

2. Economic problems There are a lot of economic problems in this industry as there are a lot of publisher and developer problems. The problem is regarding the royalties. Actually a particular amount of the royalty should go to the developer and the rest should go to the publisher. But the trend is that the publishers but the development studio itself so there is no option of dividing the royalty itself.

Apart from these practices there are some other practices such as the problem regarding the creative control of the video games. However the industry has managed to survive and flourish along with these.