Raheel

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.

Nick, I agree. Imagine semantic analysis, recommendation tech and who knows what else added to that mix and we're just at the beginning of a very exciting era.

The Social Web TV - "Open Stack" Meetup Pt8

Having Conquered Flickr & Yahoo, "The Newsfeed" Is Now the Dominant Info-Metaphor of Our Time

The internet is really exciting. There's a whole lot of information on it - an overwhelming amount, even. Years ago we first looked at it in monochrome text, then we started looking at it through a search box on an empty white page. What's next? Is it huge War Games style multi-monitor displays? A swirling UI somewhere between Tom Cruise in Minority Report and David Bowie in Labrynth? Today we're ready to declare The Newsfeed the dominant internet metaphor of the day; the cascading waterfall of updates from your friends, with comments swirling even around those - that model is everywhere now! Today one of the biggest photo sharing websites and the biggest news and email portal in the world both fell under the spell of the Newsfeed.

Pricing on Purpose By Ronald J. Baker

"With Pricing on Purpose, Ron Baker had made an enormous contribution to the better understanding of pricing that will be accessible to anyone who wants to learn. People are intrigued by instances of what they see as idiosyncratic pricing. Sometimes it is idiosyncratic, but oft-times it is fiendishly clever and well researched. So is this book. There are examples that at first sight seem to have nothing to do with the subject at hand, but the learning points are all made and explained in any number of interesting and memorable ways. Pricing on Purpose is a welcome and valuable addition to the learning on pricing and I recommend it to professional pricers, marketers, and anyone interested in capturing the value their business creates." —Eric G. Mitchell, President, Professional Pricing Society, www.pricingsociety.com

"Ron Baker is what I'd call a 'thought giant.' In his first two books he literally began a revolution in the accounting and legal professions. Thousands of professionals in public practice now lead far better, more rewarding lives thanks to him. Now he's broadened his impact in a huge way. Read this book, implement the ideas and you'll never look at your prices or your pricing policies in the same way again. You'll be richer in many ways because of it." —Paul Dunn, founder and CEO, ResultsNet Australia, coauthor, The Firm of the Future: A Guide for Accountants, Lawyers, and Other Professional Services, www.resultsnetaustralia.com

I think that just like the invention of the printing press hastened the decline of church power, the invention of the corporation hastened the decline of government power, the Internet will probably hasten the decline of corporate power.

Yet another reminder of the old saying “Those who can do. Those who can’t teach.” You couldn’ be further from the truth. Facebook, or more generically any social networking platform, has significant advantages such as the ability to instantly add/configure/customize/network an application. This dramatically lowers the barriers to entry (correct on that point), but it also lowers the cost of switching for users. Yes, creating a standard (massive usage) creates a barrier to switching, but not an insurmountable barrier. Frankly, “social networking” as application is boring to me and it may prove to be a fad. I don’t really care about the minor personal gestures of my 400+ friends. But the social platform is exceptionally compelling to me as a user, developer and visionary. Social discovery and vetting of application is huge. I’ll drop one app and add a competitor in 2 minutes. My friends will do the same if it offers a compelling value. Your application of the old school metrics of the PC platform to a social platform ignores the low switching costs, social discovery of applications, incredibly low marketing costs and all of the other benefits of a social platform that will power future applications. The fact that one person in a dorm room can write a killer app that can spread virally is exceptionally powerful. That simply cannot happen on the PC. It can happen on the web, but having done it a couple of times myself, I can tell you it is costly. Will Facebook become the ultimate platform, will OpenSocial win, will browsers encapsulate social connectivity across all websites/webapps, will the semantic web finally deliver? I don’t know the winner, but social apps are here to stay. Yes there will be a lot of crap apps, but the social fabric will help separate the wheat from the chaff. Sorry, but I give your analysis an F :)

Facebook’s most important strategic asset is not its community of developers but its network of users.

Does Platform build or leverage this strategic asset?

from my experience most social media consultancies are a waste of time, money and effort - a disproportionate amount of effort is placed on marketing (esp branding). most of the real strategic value in this medium is beyond purely the marketing function, and needs attention at a the central organizing function of the business. many of "social marketers" are far too obsessed with measuring brand. this is a BIG distraction imo. the interactive agencies lack the business rigor and corp strategy competency. SM is growing up - should be focusing instead, on achieving whole new levels of value. real step function increases.  a tip paul - my advise would be to pick a real GROWN UP innovation strategy firm. It's that important. It's not about selling the same old stuff, in a new way, but focusing further up the value chain. your precious contacts will thank you for it.

Bourdieu defines social capital as, "the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition." (248) An individual's social capital is determined by the size or their relationship network, the sum of its cumulated resources (both cultural and economic), and how successfully (quickly) the individual can set them it in motion. According to Bourdieu, social networks must be continuously maintained and fostered over time in order for them to be called upon quickly in the future.

Mobile social money, the final frontier? In the final part of discussions of social networks, media, banking and money, I thought I would turn attention to the use of mobile devices as access media to these networks. Mobile usage in banking has grown to a crescendo in the past year, after bubbling away nicely since the turn of this century. This is in part down to the fact that the latest smartphones allow a bank to deploy fully functional internet banking services to mobile devices using the same platform as their main websites. In other words, it is now cost-effective and appropriate to do this. However, the challenge with mobile finance is that we tend to discuss mobiles as one homogenous group of devices when: (a) there are many devices; and (b) the use of mobile devices to access financial services are not homogenous. Let’s look at (a) first.

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The New Economics of Music: File-Sharing and Double Moral Hazard Part 1: Why the Music Industry is (Really) Broken ‘The whole point of digital music is the risk-free grazing’ – Cory Doctorow Every major label 's setting up an iTunes these days. They're all, in the immortal words of Johnny Cash, 'born to lose, and destined to fail'. Why? The music industry doesn't understand the microeconomics of it's own business. If it did, it would see that it's business model is not just misguided, but broken- because, DRM or not, the implicit contract it signs with listeners is being broken in both directions. I reached this conclusion because, as I was scoping BoingBoing one day, I read Cory's statement, and it struck me as exactly right. For many people, digital music's more about risk than it is about music itself. Not legal risk - but transactional risk, the kind of risk you take when you buy a used car. Now, this statement has deep economic meaning. I'd like to explain why.

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.

An introduction to personas and how to create them Written by Tina Calabria, published March 2nd, 2004 Categorised under: articles, intranets, usability & information architecture, websites Before embarking on any intranet or website design project, it is important to understand the needs of your users. It is then possible to identify the features and functionality that will make the intranet or website a success, and how the design can support users with different goals and levels of skill. There are many ways to identify the needs of users, such as usability testing, interviewing users, discussions with business stakeholders, and conducting surveys. However one technique that has grown in popularity and acceptance is the use of personas: the development of archetypal users to direct the vision and design of a web solution. This article explains what personas are, benefits of using personas, answers to common objections about personas, and practical steps towards creating them. It is meant as an introduction to personas, and provides enough information to start creating your own. If you want to know more, there are lots of resources available, particularly the work of Alan Cooper and colleagues at Cooper Interaction Design. Alan is credited with having created the first persona for software development purposes back in the early 1980s.

What are personas? Personas are archetypal users of an intranet or website that represent the needs of larger groups of users, in terms of their goals and personal characteristics. They act as ’stand-ins’ for real users and help guide decisions about functionality and design. Personas identify the user motivations, expectations and goals responsible for driving online behaviour, and bring users to life by giving them names, personalities and often a photo. Although personas are fictitious, they are based on knowledge of real users. Some form of user research is conducted before they are written to ensure they represent end users rather than the opinion of the person writing the personas. Below is a sample persona for an intranet project. This persona describes Bob, a 52 year old mechanic that works for a road service company. From Bob’s persona you can start to get a feel for his goals when using the new intranet. He wants to avoid feeling stupid, would like to retain his status as a mentor to his younger colleagues, whilst seeing the potential of the intranet to make him more informed when interacting with customers.

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.

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."

"Facebook is about people you used to know; Twitter is about people you'd like to know better."