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Jeremiah Owyang discusses how web tools and social media enable companies to connect with customers Forrester Wave Report: The Leaders in Community Platforms for Marketers (Part 4/4)

Key findings of the 9 vendors

First of all, this is still a very young market, with the average tenure of a company being just a few years in community. Despite the immaturity, we evaluated nine and were impressed with Jive Software and Telligent Systems who lead the pack because of their strong administrative and platform features and solution offerings.

Reversing the Enterprise 2.0 Pricing Model

Why is the Enterprise 2.0 market not taking off more strongly? The reason has to do partly with ill-conceived pricing structures: volume-discount (VD) schemes. Fix them, and you fix one of the obstacles preventing the market from expanding rapidly. And by fixing them is meant reversing them, in particular by using volume-increasing schemes. Pricing Tied to Volume Enterprise social computing offerings -- such as social networks or the numerous Twitter-for-the-enterprise applications that currently abound -- generally don't have complex pricing structures. They are volume-discount based: that is, the more accounts customers buy, and the more employees who use them, the larger the discount vendors give them, and the lower their average price per user will be. Some vendors advertise flat pricing schemes, but when a customer is big enough, a volume-discount deal inevitably creeps in. Value and Cost Out of Balance

Volume-discount pricing structures are simple, tried, and true. So, why aren't they efficient? The reason is because of where returns on investment (ROIs) are located. Enterprise social computing offerings provide increasing marginal productivity as they scale, at both the individual and organizational level. The more that employees use a service, the higher the margin gained by their company in productivity, and the more the company extracts value from the product. A corporate customer that has 10% of its employees using a Twitter-like product won't extract as much value as one that has 50% of its employees using it.

Jive Software makes enterprise-class social software that connects employees, customers, and partners. We have two flagship products: Clearspace, collaboration software that applies a people-centric approach to facilitate workforce networking and productivity, and solves the problems associated with legacy file-based systems; and Clearspace Community, community software that is used to engage customers, build brands, and accelerate marketing initiatives. Jive's social software solutions are used by more than 2,500 customers -- including over 15% of the Fortune 500.

3. Growth PlatformsThis area of focus refers to the selection, prioritization and communication (both internal and external) of new growth platforms and business concepts that promise to deliver long-term, sustainable competitive advantage. It is here, most especially, that high performers begin separating themselves from the pack by making the strategic distinction between effective innovation in general and the effective commercialization of innovation. Accelerating growth through innovation requires becoming more disciplined at identifying a company's innovation "center," as it were. For some companies, such as Apple, innovation generally flows from its products and services. Other companies, such as Wal-Mart, fuel growth through operational innovations. Business model innovation has helped drive companies such as eBay and Skype. Companies must manage growth from that innovation center, rather than from the periphery. Part of that commitment to innovation involves embracing new and disruptive ideas. Another important aspect is leveraging open innovation and open sourcing methods that bring together suppliers, partners, employees and management. Companies that effectively commercialize innovation also develop more risk tolerance when scanning for opportunities outside their immediate business environment. They become more willing to cannibalize products and services when investigating new growth platforms. They become more adept at the operational requirements of their winning concepts, leveraging current partners, networks, assets and distinctive capabilities to help drive growth through innovation (see "Leading by imitation," Outlook, January 2007). Finally, these companies know how to communicate their growth and innovation strategy, both within their company and to the marketplace. Like the old story of the tree falling in a deserted forest, future value that is not communicated effectively to the marketplace doesn't make any noise.

corporate venturing

Time for firms to take new view of corporate venturing, BUSINESS TIMES Business Times Malaysia 07-05-2001 THE new economy has made it necessary to see corporate venturing in a new light, according to Accenture Business Launch Center. Corporate venturing is investing and leveraging on internal and external asse Business Times...

Corporate Venturing in Denmark This paper argues that Corporate Venturing CV, i.e. activities where an existing firm actively invest in a new start-up, is a much more widespread phenomenon in Denmark than official sources claim. In addition to large CV oriented corporations such as NKT and B&O, many medium sized firms and even quite...

CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo

How do you innovate a business model?   You can create new products and services within the current business model to drive growth.  Or you can create a new business model and open up a whole new world of possibilities for the firm.  Either innovate within the current game, or change the game.  But how? 

"To build a breakthrough business model that rivals cannot easily emulate, you'll need to integrate a whole series of complementary, value creating components so the effect is cumulative,"

Here’s advise from Steve Jobs in managing in a downturn. "We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place -- the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that's exactly what we did. And it worked. And that's exactly what we'll do this time."