Ideas to Go

I've said it before, I like ideas. I like having ideas, sharing ideas, hearing about ideas, and getting others excited about ideas; even other people's ideas. There's something intrinsically fun to me about ideas. So what does it take to get an idea to go? What does it take to get others excited about them and sharing your ideas?

I recently had an idea about setting up a Creative Team at my company. Our company is a full service markting research company, so a Creative Team is not what anyone would necessarily expect. But life is about balance and imbalance to me and I thought it was time for a counterweight to all the glorious statistical modeling we do in the research world.

My idea was to build a team of folks who will help our clients become better idea generators. To help them create ideas by bringing together customers or employees or suppliers or experts. And to focus those ideas on resolving a business need; like coming up with new uses for a product, or a new way of looking at a market, or a name for a new product. You get the idea, right?

The fact is that traditional research is really lousy at generating ideas. And ideas are the stuff great products and services are made of. Why not? We'll build idea factories for our clients, and they can hire our researchers to test the ideas and help them turn them into real products. Make sense?

I thought this idea was a long-shot, but I liked it and I went with it. And today I heard from the president of our company that there's a tremendous interest in my Creative Team approach and a conference call will be set up to discuss it next week.

So what does it take to get an idea to go? I'm still not sure. But maybe part of the answer is to take the chance and tell people about your idea when you have it. And just assume they agree with you and move on. Seems to be working so far. Give it a try. An idea is a terrible thing to keep to yourself.

Phil

Early Adopters

I was very proud of myself when I set up my first blog and mentioned it to my neighbor. He said he heard from his 4-year old grand daughter last weekend and she asked him to visit her blog. So much for being an early adopter.

Right now there are over 200 million blogs, about half of them are dormant or abandonded. But blog represent a big change in how businesses are communicating with their customers. No more mechanical voices, waiting on hold, or pressing "1" for service, "2" for sales. In the future businesses will be invovled in the Blogosphere with the communities or tribes.

And its a good deal for business. In 2004 Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz turned around his company's image with developers by setting up a blog in his second week in office. All of a sudden developers could talk to the man on top and get real answers and know that they were being heard. Sun's image improved as an innovator and developers began championing the company again. Schwartz knew that talking to people and listening to them in a conversation is the best way to build trust and a relationship. And he encouraged employees to do the same. According to Scoble and Israel, Naked Conversations, in 2006 there were oover 1,000 bloggers at Sun.

So I'm setting up my blog and will be discussing Marketing Research, Creativity, Social Networking and Predictive Analytics. I look forward to it.
Phil