Contagious is highlighting the key shifts in tech, consumer culture and marketing.
The rise of virtual reality. The report takes a closer look at visual culture: increasing importance of image-led social sites. The importance of mobile video: Periscope, Snapchat. Read the full report: Most_Contagious_2015_Report
Great! So recognizable. Your unique mix of interests may turn out to be your very own super power. As a strategist I am interested in a broad variety of topics. I always have the feeling you had to specialize or stick to one discipline. Otherwise others don’t really understand what the focus of your expertise is. But not to worry anymore. Look at this great TedTalk. Multipotentialites: people with many interests and creative pursuits. Wapnick refers to
3 powers: idea synthesis, rapid learning and adaptability.
Author, entrepreneur and artist, Wapnick was blessed with so many interests that she was unable to pick just one. She studied music, visual arts, film production and law, and graduated from the Law Faculty at McGill University. After years of feeling anxious about her zigzagging career path and hyphenated credentials, she finally decided to embrace her plural nature and start a movement for others who lean toward being “multipotentialites.” Since launching her website, Puttylike, in 2010, Wapnick has inspired thousands of multipotentialites to stop trying to fit themselves into boxes, and embrace their plurality. Currently, she is working on her forthcoming book, “Multipotentialite.”
Today’s fastest growing, most profoundly impactful companies are using a completely different operating model.
These companies are lean, mean, learning machines. They have an intense bias to action and a tolerance for risk, expressed through frequent experimentation and relentless product iteration. They hack together products and services, test them, and improve them, while their legacy competition edits PowerPoint. They are obsessed with company culture and top tier talent, with an emphasis on employees that can imagine, build, and test their own ideas. They are maniacally focused on customers. They are hypersensitive to friction – in their daily operations and their user experience. They are open, connected, and build with and for their community of users and co-conspirators. They are comfortable with the unknown – business models and customer value are revealed over time. They are driven by a purpose greater than profit; each has its own aspirational “dent in the universe.” We may simply refer to them as the first generation of truly responsive organizations.
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To win in the marketplace, someone has to create and deliver exceptional products, services, and experiences, and planning won’t get us there. the emphasis on People is all about making. “Makers” are people who have skills (as opposed to credentials). They think by doing: experimenting, testing, and learning. Within these high performance cultures management has evolved into something more akin to mentorship. The thinking goes, if workers are capable of making decisions about their priorities and workflow, what’s left for the manager is skills development, knowledge sharing, and helping with roadblocks – the Montessori method gone corporate.
I finally got round to watch the TedX presentation by my former Re:Set colleague Tom Kniesmeijer. I love it. It adresses the issues in our society (Zeitgeist) and what you as an individual can do with it. As he puts it: We’re doing too much. Stand still, take a look inside and train your meaning muscle. Tom Kniesmeijer introduces the revolution of meaning. And this revolution needs you!
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Trends from Cannes Lions 2015. Great overview with all the best campaigns included..
This is intruiging. Gavin Munro of Derbyshire-based Full Grown explains how moulding trees into one-piece chairs, lamps or mirror frames is far more eco-friendly than felling. This is no ordinary furniture showroom. In a field on the side of a hill 15 miles north of Derby lie row after row of perfectly maintained willow, oak, ash and sycamore trees. What clearly mark this field out from a regular forest are the blue-and-black plastic moulds that are training the trees in pre-defined routes, where they are gently and expertly manipulated into the exact shape of a chair, a table, a lamp or a mirror frame. read more
This presentation by Thomas Griffiths, Planner at DigitasLBi is great for all brand strategists. I particularly like the idea and heart of his talk that brands should give the control back to the people in the conversations we have with them. He describes the development of tight, closed communities. the brand becomes shattered in these diverse groups and that’s okay. Let the consumer work it out for themselves.
Extensive presentation by Jan Smiedgen about design thinking
This is a great report: Advanced design methods for successful innovation by Design United, a platform for Dutch Research in Design of the 3TU Industrial Design programmes. The book covers recent methods from design research and design consultancy in the Netherlands. I recently came across this report, although it was already launched in september, 2013.
As a brand strategist I like the discussion about the concept ‘the brand as a lens’. How a brand could drive innovation, and sets a process of change in motion, with the intention of improving a competitive situation and or/creating new value. In other words the brand has a process role (triggers and inspires change) and it has a content role (give direction to that change).
Brand_Lens_Design_United
Currently, I am thinking about creating / finding a framework that visualises this thought of ‘the brand as a lens’ and the impact this has inside an organization. From management, employees, customers, processes and value output perspective. And the impact is has outside an organization: the role you have (or wish to have) within an ecosystem, your positioning and brand image. Book suggestions, articles or other interesting ideas on this matter are very welcome. Paula Buit
The Dutch designer uses computers, robotics and 3-D printers to make pieces that sometimes surprise even him. Read this article about the great designs he creates. Read the article here: Joris Laarman’s Furniture of the Future
SPARK IDEAS 