Combinatorial innovation

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.”

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The Operating Model That Is Eating The World

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.

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Technology + Creativity

Trends from Cannes Lions 2015. Great overview with all the best campaigns included..

APG Noisy Thinking

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.

Design Thinking – Bootcamp

Extensive presentation by Jan Smiedgen about design thinking

Behaviour change as Value proposition

 

SxSW 2013: Behavior Change as Value Proposition by Chris Risdon

Quit The Denial campaign

How to design behaviour change communications for a particularly hard to reach group, young social smokers. The Ontario Ministery of Health and BBDO used insights from the target group to guide communication. The key challenge of the brief: “how can we encourage people who don’t identify themselves as smokers, to quit smoking? This resulted in the ‘Quit The Denial’ campaign.

The campaign, which compares ‘social’ smoking behaviours to a range of unflattering and ridiculous activities (farting, earwax picking, etc.), aims to reframe smoking behaviours in the minds of the audience and wider community. It was mentioned by the CNN as this might be “the best public service announcement ever…”,

Saving your creative soul

A well told message from Scott Berkun about how the creative process works. Listen to yourself, independent of others. Keep Going, do it anyway. Because “Making Stuff” is all about sit there and do the work. That’s the challenge. Loved this, made me get back to work with my own ideas about design thinking and strategy.

Planning for Transmedia

Presentation by Griffin Farley, strategist BBH New York with two AXE cases to illustrate the story. Nice work.

What is digital strategy?

Looks at answering what the role of a Digital Strategist is in an Advertising Agency. A relative of the Communications Planner, Strategic Planner and Account Planner, Digital Strategy concentrates on understanding the digital consumer, brand, media and creativity.

Looking at the core skills of Insight Mining, Communication Planning and Digital Metrics for success.

Thanks to Mark Pollard, Ana Andjelic, Mike Arauz and the many other Digital Strategists.

This is a presentation from the online course ‘Crash Course to Digital Strategy’ that you can sign up to on Skillshare for $20 http://skl.sh/VOj2ol. See on slideshare for more interesting presentations on Strategy and Ideas.