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Diversity breeds creativity--ecosystems are richest where habitats and species overlap. With more connections and diversity comes more creativity: diverse communities are more interesting, more provocative, and more stimulating.

In 2005, Google set a formula for distributing its engineering efforts: 70-20-10. Seventy percent of Google’s resources are devoted to improving search and advertising, Google’s primary source of revenue and profits. Twenty percent is allotted as free time for people to pursue projects of their own choosing. And ten percent is invested in scaling up the most promising ideas that emerge from the 20% time, the wild cards that could develop into whole new lines of business.

Jack Welch, GE: “Size either liberates or paralyzes. We tried every day to remember that the benefit of size was that it allowed us to take more swings.”

Eric Schmidt, Google: “Our goal is to have more at-bats per unit of time and effort than anyone else in the world.”

Jeff Bezos, Amazon: “You need to set up and organize so that you can do as many experiments per unit of time as possible.”

The more things you try, the better your chances of discovering something valuable.

For emergent strategy to be successful, there must be enough autonomy, freedom, and slack in the system for people and resources to connect in a peer-to-peer way, like they do in Silicon Valle

Employees at Mailchimp, an email marketing company with about 100 employees, decide on new features and services in a similar way. If someone has an idea, they attempt to recruit another person to help them work on a prototype or to help convince others. At Mailchimp, people get excited by good ideas, and they are trusted, so they have the autonomy to follow their instincts. To be recruited, a person must consider it more interesting or useful than the things they are already working on. Like the ants, recruitment turns to escalating commitment over time as more people are recruited to the project. When enough people are recruited, a team is formed and commits to seeing the project through to completion. In this way, ideas compete for resources and the best ideas end up bearing fruit.

But Digital Sport is not just about creating must-have sports gadgets. Getting so close to its consumers' data holds exceptional promise for one of the world's greatest marketers: It means it can follow them, build an online community for them, and forge a tighter relationship with them than ever before.

Nike's spending on TV and print advertising in the U.S. has dropped by 40% in just three years, even as its total marketing budget has steadily climbed upward to hit a record $2.4 billion last year. "There's barely any media advertising these days for Nike," says Brian Collins, a brand consultant and longtime Madison Avenue creative executive.

n 2000, Wieden handled all of Nike's estimated $350 million in U.S. billings. Now those campaigns are increasingly split between Wieden and a host of other agencies that specialize in social media and new technologies.

Gone is the reliance on top-down campaigns celebrating a single hit -- whether a star like Tiger Woods, a signature shoe like the Air Force 1, or send-ups like Bo Jackson's 'Bo Knows' commercials from the late '80s that sold the entire brand in one fell Swoosh. In their place is a whole new repertoire of interactive elements that let Nike communicate directly with its consumers, whether it's a performance-tracking wristband, a 30-story billboard in Johannesburg that posts fan headlines from Twitter, or a major commercial shot by an Oscar-nominated director that makes its debut not on primetime television but on Facebook.

It spent nearly $800 million on 'nontraditional' advertising in 2010, according to Advertising Age estimates, a greater percentage of its U.S. advertising budget than any other top 100 U.S. advertiser. (And Nike's latest filings indicate that that figure will grow in 2011.)

Two years ago a group including Stefan Olander, 44, a longtime marketing executive (and Matthew McConaughey look-alike) formally pitched Parker on the idea for Digital Sport, a cross-category division that would take the Nike+ idea -- chip-enabled customer loyalty -- into other sports. Up and running a month later, the Digital Sport division now works across all of Nike's major sports.

The reason for the shift is simple: Nike is going where its customer is.

But as the marketing mix becomes less about hero worship and more about consumer-driven conversation, they say, Nike is insulating itself from an era of athlete endorsements gone wrong. "Everybody's realized there's not the same one-to-one relationship as in the past: When Jordan's hot, his shoes are hot," says a former Nike executive. "I don't know if hero worship is the same as it used to be."

That's not to say everything has been a slam dunk. Nike shut down its Joga network after the last World Cup game in 2006, confusing the million-plus members who'd signed up for it. Its Ballers Network, meanwhile -- launched in 2008 as an app that let basketball players organize street games -- recently had less than 300 users in the U.S.; a recent wall post was a teenager complaining he couldn't get it to work. And critics say products like the FuelBand and Nike+, while dazzling, are more about keeping Nike's retail prices high than innovating.

Map the pieces: This is perhaps the most challenging step. The overarching goal is to create an “ecosystem,” or community, of some sort–in short, a company’s own network that includes customers, prospects, and partners. This enables increased engagement with existing members, while promoting growth by adding new members. A place to start is understanding where the company stands across three distinct digital approaches–search engine marketing based on static Web sites and perhaps email marketing systems; permission-based inbound marketing based on attracting opt-in members and then building engagement through customer relationship management systems and content nurture streams; and social marketing and social sales based on understanding and leveraging social networks. One key question to ask is, “What should be at the center?”

the CRM system may take the central position rather than the Web site.

the real benefits come from achieving local leverage by encouraging a wide range of employees and partners to develop their own social presence, as well.

executives need to understand and articulate how the structure reflects the approach to growing customer lifetime value.

Assemble the components: Once the pieces are mapped based on the shape of the customer opportunities, the next challenge is to assemble a specific set of components with an eye toward flexibility and cost effectiveness. Given the remarkably rapid rate of innovation, leaders need to avoid being locked into expensive commitments that won’t be easy to continue to change. A series of principles can really help here.

build, test, and monitor prototypes until they work perfectly. Investing extra time and effort at this stage can make the step of expanding the system much quicker and less expensive, as well as making broad implementation much smoother.

Engage the organization around content, and marshal the resources to make it successful. Once a system is developed, it has to be used to full effect to capture the available benefits. And in today’s world, that requires a large, steady stream of content. Types of content include articles, blogs, white papers, contests, games, webinars, videos, posts to discussion groups, tweets, and infographics (to name a few). Increasingly, content generation is evolving into a companywide responsibility, rather than simply a marketing responsibility. Senior executives need to embrace and then encourage this. Although this is a relatively undeveloped area, management processes that reward the generation and dissemination of great content will undoubtedly lead to great value. And social management platforms that enable rapid and easy sharing of existing content, along with monitoring for compliance purposes, are already enjoying rapid growth.

Constantly measure and monitor in order to learn and improve:

margins should improve, acquisition costs should drop, and churn rates should decline