Leaning forward, looking backward

Aaron Gustafson has a good post at A List Apart today on the concept of progressive enhancement, which is a different way of looking at how websites should be developed in order to provide satisfactory experiences in a variety of browsers (old, new, "differently abled" e.g., mobile, etc.) In a nutshell (sorry, Gustafson uses a candy-coated peanut analogy in his post) progressive enhancement focuses on content, while the more widely embraced and older alternative approach, graceful degradation, is more focused on the browser itself.

This got me thinking about scalability. Progressive enablement is focused on the scalability of the essential nugget of what makes the experience valuable, rather than the the trappings of the experience -- the degree to which a particular browser pays fidelity to, say, your fancy navigation scheme. We also tend to think and talk a lot about scalability of technology, but as a strategist, I generally worry more about the scalability of a strategic idea. This notion has a couple of dimensions:

Will the idea scale for your market? Will it accomodate and actually become stronger with the progressive inclusion of more and more voices and opinions outside of your control? Does it enable your brand to evolve with the input of your audience - or does it position your brand in a narrowly constrained box incapable of growth? Conversely, does it have value when it is still lightly populated?

Will the idea scale for your business? Assuming the best case – your idea is successful and widely adopted – will it outstrip your operational capacity? Upset the balance of core competencies? Take the brand to a place where, for whatever reason, you deem it not appropriate or supportable for it to go?

Open-ended musings for a Friday morning. Let me know if they resonate.

UPDATE: From the adlab, the National Debt Clock runs out of room – in a depressing but timely illustration of the scalability of ideas.

Headspace for ideas

From Live Science, via Yahoo!, comes this article citing a University of Minnesota study that "...suggests that ceiling height affects problem-solving skills and behavior by priming concepts that encourage certain kinds of brain processing. "

"Priming means a concept gets activated in a person's head," researcher Joan Meyers-Levy told LiveScience. "When people are in a room with a high ceiling, they activate the idea of freedom. In a low-ceilinged room, they activate more constrained, confined concepts."

While our conference rooms at THINK could not reasonably be described as "cathedral-like," we do offer our relatively high 14' conference room ceilings -- in conjunction with our proprietary Idea Engine ideation facilitation techniques -- as a pretty reliable way to come up with new ideas for your business.

If any good can come from great evil...

Through history, moments of great adversity have often increased the speed of adoption of transformative technologies. Wars have given us widespread availability of radar, sonar and reliable wireless communications, Katrina drove expansion of the use of social networking and other self-publishing tools, and so on.

Will one outcome of the horrors at Virginia Tech be a sea-change in the adoption of text messaging networks? VT will join other schools such as Penn State in offering students the ability to register for text messaging, via offerings from vendors such as Rave Wireless.

But that's really the tip of the iceberg. What we should be looking at is the widespread adoption of text messaging for up-to-the minute alerting of critical news based on affiliation or place-based context... if:

• Carriers re-think their pricing models, and abandon the usurious surcharges for text messaging (by the message or flat-rate) that maintain it as a niche product for youth. In countries where SMS is dirt-cheap, volume is high.
• Carriers (or messaging networks) work with public safety officials to create more global opt-ins for messaging about public safety issues such as, heavens forbid, the incident at VT, an upcoming tsunami, a major hazardous material spill, etc. We still sit through those tests of the emergency broadcast system on terrestrial radio, after all.

Omnilert and M/A-Com have offerings that have enjoyed limited uptake. Time to get rolling on more widespread adoption.

Strategy vs. tactics

Good post from Steve Smith at Mobile Insider tracking the speed and breadth of digitally-delivered influence... with a great example tracking his daughter's sources of musical influence and taste-making. While we always worry about the applicability of the personal example, the Insider makes a great point: with technology enabling behavior, our ability to transcend the tactic and see through to the underlying strategy is a critical skill. Smith quotes Jonathan Kobb, CEO of Kiptronic:

...the independent audio and video show producers with whom he works are no longer considering themselves “podcasters” so much as media brands. “Podcasting is just a siloed model,” he says. “What podcasting enabled was this huge growth in the quantity of media online, the blogicization of media where you have millions of different sources, and they aren’t just putting it into podcasts. In downloadable media they are redistributing it online and into phones.”

In other words, the podcast is the tactic -- the new tastemaking and influence model is the playing ground for strategy.

Tomorrow's kooky consumer

Media Daily reports on Faith Popcorn's predictions for consumer's continued evolution in 2007. Her big headline: growth of the "networked" consumer. "The technological advances of the information age have produced the most powerful tools yet for shaping our collective human destiny," according to Popcorn's BrainReserve. "The world has simultaneously become more fluid and more connected, one of both infinite possibility and extreme intimacy. As a result, people are turning away from the ego-driven self-aggrandizement that characterized the old era of hyper-consumption."

Popcorn's other critical consumer trends to track:

Identity Flux: Gender-neutrality goes mainstream. People list skills on their business cards rather than title. They dress up in various costumes, depending on who they feel like being that day.

Liquid Brands: Chameleon-like brands focus less on communicating a static message and more on being the right thing for the right persona at the right time. Constantly morphing retailers carry products until they sell out, and never restock.

Virtual Immortality: While some let their avatars drift away to online purgatory, many more leave behind specific instructions on how their virtual selves should proceed. Services offering avatar surrogates flourish, and we bequeath avatars to friends and family in our wills.

Environmental Movement: Companies are expected to reduce the amount of damage they are doing to our minds. Savvy companies sponsor marketing-free white spaces in lieu of polluting the environment with models and logos.

Product Placement: Enviro-biographies are attached to just about everything, letting consumers know the entire life story of a product: where the materials were harvested, where it was constructed, how far it traveled, and where it ended up after being thrown away or recycled.

Brand-Aides: Socially responsible brands make a buck while providing desperately needed services. Communities are revived by Target daycare, Starbucks learning centers and Avis transportation services for the elderly.

Moral Status Anxiety: A person's net worth is no longer measured by dollars earned, but by improvements made. Families compete with each other on how many people they fed while on vacation, and the most envied house on the block is not the biggest, but the most sustainable.

Oldies but Goodies: Respect for elders makes a comeback in the form of Ask Your Grandma hotlines. The proliferation of online video clips by seniors show us how to tie knots and concoct home remedies.

Love 'em or hate 'em, there they are -- as usually, they sound pretty kooky, but prescient marketers seem to find a way to take one or another and build a bridge to a differentiated future for their brands. Success stories such as Nike+, YouTube and BabyCenter are all built on insights into what people might be willing to do next, rather than just what is they are doing now.

Collaboration 2.0

Back in the day, 1.0 collaboration tools like Groove and, to a lesser extent, the remote presentation tools like WebEx, presented a compelling idea: let remote teams work together in a shared, virtual workspace. However, the experience was just too clunky for the benefits to overcome the costs.

We were early users of Groove and wished that it really worked well. Now we're trying out several of a new generation of tools -- starting with Thinkature, described by it's creators as "a collaboration environment, a meeting room, a personal web-based whiteboard, or something entirely new." (Thanks, TechCrunch for the lead on this.) Well, that's just about the same promise Groove made -- how will it work in a 2.0 world?

Not having to download a client is possibly the most compelling feature of the 2.0 take on collaboration. In the past, clients helped keep local copies of files synched across the workgroup. With ubiquitous web access, I'm more comfortable with the shared work living on the web. (Of course, nothing terribly secure goes out there -- next level of problem to solve.) And the lack of a single answer is annoying -- Thinkature is good for whiteboarding and mapping, Vyew adds document sharing and web conferencing, but the visual collaboration isn't as good. Can this stuff be mashed up?

The question at the heart of the issue, of course, is how will our own ability to ideate in relationship with others evolve. For most of my generation, we just do it better in a f2f setting. We're wired that way. We've grown quite used to serial collaboration remotely, first via email, IM and now via wiki... but parallel collaboration continues to work best around a table. Preferably with good coffee and snacks.

How quickly will the capabilities of the organism adapt? We see lots of evidence of  adaptive behaviors among the young, including simultaneous use of multiple media. But amidst all the CGMM, social networking, crowdsourcing, and even the work to date done in virtual worlds, parallel collaboration still seems to be at the horizon.

This geezer will continue to try.

Power of ideas: 3G vs. A really useful phone

InStat uses global research to address what they're calling common "half-truths" about 3G adoption. This analysis reinforces what we tend to see as a common occurrence (typified by Gartner's hype cycle) -- the trip from  the "peak of inflated expectations" to the "trough of disillusionment" is often based on the difference between the "idea" of the technology itself, and the "idea" for use that takes hold in the marketplace. So a few  folks want video, but more actually want GPS directions in real time on their phones... again, we learn, it's not really about 3G -- it's about new ways for phones to be useful.

Are you in touch with the user-driven idea for the technology you're busy rolling out?

Free idea: Sun's Blackbox Launch

Sun's new Blackbox mobile data center may or may not be a great idea technically -- that kind of assessment is outside my area of expertise.

It is, however, the perfect product for a marketing idea I developed almost ten years ago for a leading data storage hardware vendor. That idea never made it out of the agency to the client meeting, and now I offer it to Sun, free of charge.

Simply, the idea was to demonstrate the power of high-capacity, rapidly-scalable storage by doing two things:

• Embarking on what can only be considered a quest: storing a digital image of the face of every person on Earth
• Locate the boxes storing the images in iconic public locations: Times Square, Red Square, Syndey Harborside, and so forth, in a giant glass box, with walk-up digital cameras and wall-to-wall monitors cycling through random global portraits.

Storage is storage, in many ways -- the core of this idea was to enoble this inherently bland medium by creating a snapshot not of the natural wonders of the globe, but of the people who occupy it.

There you go, Sun. Yours if you want it, just about the biggest idea I ever came up with. (And if anybody knows Scott McNealy or Anil Gadre, feel free to forward this idea along.)

Innovation Snapshots

FutureThink has a continually evolving series of Innovation Snapshots available on their site. This is always an interesting source of ideas -- many seemingly at the fringe, but also some with immediate relevance and application.