Putting consumers into the forefront of the strategy process to drive innovation to new heights.

The World Innovation Convention is probably the most exciting Event on Innovation for 2010 and destined to become a gateway for innovators from across key industries and diversified fields. Passion & vision for innovation is the issue at the amazing venue, Seafront Convention Hall Ibiza. The “Strategic Location” Ibiza itself is renowned as the world’s center of erotic gravitation… Here you find the World Innovation Convention Brochure and here the promotion code for a 20% discount. I am earlier in May in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Expo, so I unfortunately can’t attend.

Foremost industry experts from European Commission, Virgin Galactic, Coca Cola, Mclaren, Philips, Intel, Basf, Pfizer, P&G and many others are invited to deliver latest insights into how these major brands are streamlining innovation to create products and brands that have a mass appeal for consumers.

And here is my Must Read List for (Lean Startup) web entrepreneurs:

1. The Four Steps to the Epiphany – Steven Gary Blank (Customer Development)

The key contributors to an out-of-control burn rate is 1) hiring a sales force too early, 2) turning on the demand creation activities too early, 3) developing something other than the minimum feature set for first customer ship. – Steven Gary Blank

2. Kopf schlägt Kapital (Head Beats Capital) – Günter Faltin

3. The Second Bounce Of The Ball: Turning Risk into Opportunity – Ronald Cohen

I find the decision tree very helpful. It is one of the most helpful tools that I took from Harvard Business School – Ronald Cohen

4. Viral Loop: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow… – Adam L. Penenberg

…the first full year, they pulled in $600,000 in almost pure profit, and their revenue doubled each and every year that followed. (…) Two years later Hong and Young sold Hot or Not for $20 million. – Adam L. Penenberg

5. Agile Estimating and Planning – Mike Cohn

6. Design Web Interfaces – Theresa Neil, Bill Scott

7. Rocket Surgery Made Easy: Finding and Fixing Usability Problems – Steve Krug

When it comes to finding and fixing usability problems, if I had to choose between awesome analytics that could tell me exactly what my users are doing (but with no chance to know what they’re thinking while they’re doing it) or sitting with one user with the ability to hear what he’s thinking and ask probing questions, I’d take the one user every time. – Steve Krug

8. Crossing the Chasm – Geoffrey A. Moore

9. What Would Google Do? – Jeff Jarvis

10. The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing… – Denise Shiffman

Every Marketer must read this book [Age of Engage] – Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google

Just encountered:

Vor knapp zwei Jahren habe ich beim DuMont/Madsack Venture Day die Gründer und das Konzept von reBuy kennengelernt und bin sofort zum Fan geworden. Der Plattform, die damals noch als trade-a-game unterwegs war, hatte ich in einem kurzen Post das rasante Durchstarten vorausgesagt und ich war nicht der einzige, den die Jungs beindruckt haben. Der Markenwechsel – von trade-a-game zu reBuy und eine zweite Finanzierungsrunde zeigen auch, wie dieses Video, dass die Richtung weiterhin stimmt.

Das Lean Startup Framework von Eric Ries ist ein mächtiges Tool für Startups. Aktuell ist das Konzept des talentierten Entrepreneurs nicht nur in Harvard und Stanford ein Thema, denn viel Zeit und Geld kann mit den Lean Startup Methoden nicht nur in Startups gespart werden. Auch Features, die keiner braucht, können so vermieden werden. Eric vereint eine Reihe von Ideen und Techniken, die vom Ansatz her ursprünglich vom Lean Management aus der Autoindustrie stammen und über den Umweg von SCRUM Agiler Softwareentwicklung und Dave McClures AARRR Startup Metric zu Steve Blank’s unverzichtbarem Customer Development gefunden haben. Eric hat heute einen Post mit den wichtigsten Lean Startup Ressourcen gebloggt. Ein spannendes Thema, das auch hier in Deutschland seine Wellen schlagen wird. Eric ist nicht nur für Startups, sondern für jeden, der sich mit Innovationen beschäftigt ein Glücksfall.

Eric Ries in Stanford: Debunking Myths of Entrepreneurship

A year ago, there was no lean startup movement. The term was known by maybe a few dozen people. Being an evangelist for these ideas earned me a regular diet of funny looks and patronizing comments. At that time, my wildest dreams did not include even a fraction of what’s happened since.

I continue to believe that the explosion of interest in the lean startup has very little to do with me. Rather, I see it as a reflection of a worldwide openness to new ideas about entrepreneurship. Recent economic events, technological change, and the rapid diffusion of information about the old models have combined to help us all realize just how important entrepreneurship is – and just how little we really know about it.

Dazu drei Beiträge, die es in sich haben:

• Harvard Business Review: Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?
• Methodologist: How to design your Business Model as a Lean Startup?
• Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner: Steve Blank, The Customer Development Process

Fortune Magazine author John Brodie wrote in a readable story how Net-A-Poter is doing for $2,000 Calvin Klein dresses what Amazon did for “The Da Vinci Code” and iTunes for Coldplay.

Chic digital merchant Net-a-porter is proving that women will buy a $2,000 dress with just a click of a BlackBerry.

Traditionally designers have shown their spring collections in the fall (and fall collections in the spring) so that store buyers could place orders six months in advance (and magazine editors could likewise prepare their coverage). In the era of the iPhone, consumers can’t understand why they must wait so long for a product they have already seen on the runway.

Nor do consumers appreciate the mixed messages they receive from department stores and fashion magazines: Buyers at department stores generally base their orders on sales figures from the past, hoping to repeat their successes, while fashion editors often gravitate to the most avant-garde pieces, which will make dramatic pictures.

“So you have one industry that was very forward-thinking and one that was very backward-thinking, and stuck in the middle is the consumer who was being told what to buy but not necessarily where to find it,” says Massenet, whose editorial and buying teams travel to shows together. “So by creating a site that does both, we think the place where the time-starved consumer gets her fashion news will also be the place where she chooses to shop.”

VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, it provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors. Developing tools for customer independence and engagement with vendors seems to be next Big Thing.

Doc Sears wrote some catchy explanations in the VRM Blog:

What VRM proposes is shifting appropriate relationship responsibility to customers, for the simple reason that the customer is, for many purposes, the best point of integration for his or her own data and the best point of origination for what can be done with it.

For example, a customers VRM system should be able to say, globally, I want receipts emailed to me. Here is my email address. You can do business with me if you don’t share that address with anybody, and if you don’t send me unwanted emails. Sign here (digitally) if you agree to these terms. Yes, that may sound scary to sellers, but guess what? The customer-control horse left the seller’s barn as soon as the Internet came along. All that precious customer data that sellers think they own is a tiny fraction of what they can gain from customers in a relationship where both sides are open to whatever the other brings to the table. In other words, one in which the seller does not speak of acquiring, managing, controlling, owning or locking in customers as if they were slaves.

Much more money to be made in VRM than in CRM:

My point: it’s early. The Net is a giant zero between everything and everybody. It takes distance, connectivity and the costs of storage and distribution all toward zero. There is still plenty of money to be made at the commodity level (just ask Nick Carr, or Amazon), but that’s one more reason why the Giant Zero is a great place to build all kinds of new businesses. And why it’s still very, very early in what Craig Burton calls the terraforming of the Net’s new world.

The point [...] is that there is much more money to be made, in this Giant Zero world, in helping demand find and drive supply, than in helping supply find and drive demand. And that this will be much better for the supply side than the old system, where suppliers have to do it all.

Panel Diskussionen mit interessanten Diskutanten sind eine Freude, auch – oder gerade dann, wenn die Meinungen auseinander gehen. So habe ich mich auch über den Anruf von Björn Negelmann gefreut, der mich in die Diskussion zum Thema “Community Marketing” gebeten hat, die live als Webcast gesendet wurde. Unten die Aufzeichnung von zaplive.tv.

Panel Teilnehmer (v.l.n.r.): Prof. Dr. Ralf Schengber (Professor/GF, FH Münster/DSaF GmbH), Frank Schultheiss (GF Deine Tierwelt GmbH & Co. KG), Dirk Beckmann (GF artundweise GmbH), Markus Beele (Director Digital Marketing Central Europe, Warner Music), Arne Flick (Inhaber, rio nord)

Ganz Interessant zu beobachten, wie die “Groundswell” jetzt auch durch Deutschland spült. Die aktuelle Nielsen Studie zeigt deutlich, die unaufhaltsame Entwicklung. Willkommen im “Age of Engage”.

Consumer engagement within social
networks has the potential to change
the way consumers are targeted, not
just through the digital medium, but
through all forms of traditional media.
Whilst a few billion dollars of ad revenue
can’t be wrong, the prevailing wisdom is
that the current level of advertising
activity on social networks isn’t
consummate with the size and highly
engaged levels of the audience.

Die Entwicklung der unterschiedlichen Ansätze von Facebook und MySpace in 2009 soll Aufschluss bringen:

The industry is faced with a real Catch-22
situation. Part of Facebook’s extraordinary
subscriber growth is due to a clean
design with little advertising clutter;
consequently, the audience growth
hasn’t been accompanied by a similar
surge in advertising revenue. On the
other hand, MySpace’s more customisable
entertainment and content-oriented
offering carrying more advertising
has been more successful at attracting
advertising revenue, yet MySpace’s
audience is flattening. The industry will
be watching very closely at which one of
these fundamental differences in strategy
will prove the most successful in
attracting advertising revenue in 2009.

Zuckerberg’s not interested in selling to Microsoft; he wants to build the next Microsoft. And with 175 million “friends,” he’s off to a helluva start.

Keine Sättigung in Sicht – ganz im Gegenteil: 5 MIO neue User jede Woche.

Die komplette Cover Story aus der aktuellen Fortune Ausgabe ist ein journalistisches Highlight und hier frei im Internet zu lesen.

Nur das allein wäre zu wenig für Facebook und so ist in der aktuellen Ausgabe des Economist ebenfalls ein sehr interessanter Artikel mit dem Titel “Primates on Facebook“.

Thus an average man “one with 120 friends” generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or wall. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

Hier wird die Dunbar Number aufgegriffen – wie viele Freunde kann unser Gehirn vertragen? Spannend auch die Frage, welchen Einfluss digitale Freunde auf die Größe des realen Freundeskreis haben: demnach keinen?