This document discusses how marketing can take a leadership role in innovation. It provides four recommendations: 1) Harness people's collaborative impulse through crowdsourcing and community commerce models. 2) Meet the expectations of the new generation by offering flexible working conditions and an emphasis on creativity. 3) Exploit new technologies like social media to engage customers, track sentiment, and drive innovation. 4) Loosen processes and embrace chaos by granting autonomy, tolerating failure, and thinking like designers rather than relying too heavily on traditional marketing science.

1. Marketing as Innovation Leader

2. “My centre is giving way, my right is
retreating. Impossible to
manoeuvre. Situation excellent, I
shall attack”
General Foch, 1st
Battle of Marne 1914

3. “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they
had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they
produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci &
the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had
brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy
and peace, & what did they produce? The
cuckoo clock!”
Orson Welles, The Third Man
Out of chaos …

4. … Comes Opportunity
“Recessions don't produce record numbers of new
companies, but they do seem to mark a turning
point in the formation of new businesses.”
BusinessWeek, 13th February 2009

5. Innovation at top of Agenda
• End of era of introspection, rationalisation &
incrementalism
• Organic growth & innovation back at top of
corporate agenda
– BCG/BusinessWeek Global Innovation Study 2010
• 72% of execs consider innovation = top priority in
(up from 64% in 2009)
• 84% say innovation = important/extremely important lever to reap
benefits from economic recovery
• 61% say companies will boost innovation spending (26% by
>10%)

6. The Opportunity for Marketing
• Marketing has no automatic right to lead

7. Perceptional Barriers Facing
Marketing
• Spenders rather than generators of money
• Myopic … disinterested in sources of growth/
innovation beyond marketing function
• Short-term/incrementalist
– Focused on today’s customer needs rather than
future needs
– “Senior management is increasingly on the lookout
for marketers who don’t merely do things better, but
reinvent how they go about things” Scott M. Davis, Chief
Growth Officer, Prophet
* McKinsey 2010

8. How Marketing Can Grab Hold of
Innovation Agenda
1. Harness people’s collaborative impulse
2. Meet expectations & leverage enthusiasms of
new generation
3. Exploit new tech … especially social media
4. Loosen up & embrace the chaos

9. The spirit of collective action

10. A culture of collaboration

11. Economic altruism
“people like to create & wish to
share. A surprising amount of
useful, creative or expressive
activity is generated without
any financial incentive at all”

12. Collaborative Journalism
“mutualisation” = “getting readers to care about,
inform and enhance our coverage” Meg Pickard

13. Collaborative Government?

14. Collaborative Causes

15. Collaboration as Change Agent

16. Collaboration as Disruptive Force
• Organisation without organisation
– No permanent office
– No paid employees
• Armed with a sophisticated
understanding of new technology
& an army of enthusiasts

17. Evolution of Crowdsourcing
Customising
Contributing
Creating
Solving
Collaborating

18. Numbers are Compelling
• 70% of companies regularly create value
through use of web-based communities
• Using customer communities to solve customer
problems costs 10% of traditional call centres
• Product revenues +200%
* McKinsey 2010

19. Collaborative Business Models

20. Community Commerce
 Self-sustaining creative community
 Members submit designs => 80,000+
submissions
• Opportunity to pre test beta versions
 Community votes => 800+ designs
 Designers receive $2,500 + marketing advice +
retain IP
 No professional designers, no salesforce,
no distribution, no market research, no
advertising
=> $30m revenues … high margins

21. Community Commerce
 People-powered mobile network (from O2)
 Members receive points for recruiting new
people, making suggestions & solving
problems, which are converted into cash
 20% actively involved
 Aim that 25% of members will get half of cost of
calls returned to them for contribution to
community
 Plans to involve community in pricing &
marketing decisions
 Not reliant on call centres, expensive
marketing & product support

22. Community Commerce
 “Where technology meets chocolate”
 Apply software development model to
chocolate
 Issue beta versions of new products
 Provides immediate customer feedback - from real
people consuming product in real environments and
in close to real time
 Helping fine-tune products without the need to
invest in expensive product testing research
 Flatters the egos of its most important customers,
who think of themselves as co-creators or
collaborators

23. When Collaboration Works
Lessons from the Software Industry
 Cathedral = traditional, tightly controlled
innovation model
 Bazaar = loose, open source approach,
harnessing the skills of the wider developer
community
 Not particularly effective at originating
concepts, which still rely on the spark of
individual genius to make them happen
 Very effective at testing and improving
them

24. Formula for Collaborative Success
 Ensuring strategic focus
 Publicity as bi-product not sole objective
 Planning – who, what & how?
 Obama’s 100
 Devolving control to community
 Continuous feedback loops
 Anticipating subversion
 Bieber in North Korea
 Managing IP rights

25. 1. Harness people’s collaborative impulse
2. Meet expectations & leverage enthusiasms of
new generation
3. Exploit new tech … especially social media
4. Loosen up & embrace the chaos
How Marketing Can Grab Hold of
Innovation Agenda

26. A New Generation

27. Culture of Narcissism
• Self importance
• Self entitlement
• Confidence in unique
abilities
“A world that constantly reflects back to you your own
wishes, through a computer that seems to be your friend
will inevitably enhance your sense of self and the
unwarranted belief that your views have weight & authority”
Tim Adams, the Observer, 6th
December 2009

28. Generation Me*
• 57% of young people in US agreed
that “people in my generation use
social networking sites for self
promotion, narcissism & attention
seeking”
• 40% agreed that “being self-
promoting, narcissistic,
overconfident & attention seeking is
helping for succeeding in a
competitive world”

29. Heightened Expectations
• Speed & responsiveness
“The trouble with McDonald’s is
it’s too bloody slow”
Instant access, instant
response, instant gratification
“living life through shortcuts” MTV

30. Why many institutions struggle
• Not configured to work in real time, in terms of
speed or resources
One hourOne hour Ten MinutesTen Minutes
* Critical response time for responding to negative comments

31. Heightened Expectations
of Work
• Flexible working
– 85% of Gen Y want to spend 30-70% of
time working from home
• Other priorities
– Work/Life balance
– Personal development
– Exciting job
– Motivational management
… not afraid to ask for them
& not afraid to walk away
* TalentSmoothie: Generation Y: What they want from work (2008)

32. Corporate Response
Theory Y meets Gen Y
• Emphasis on freedom & trust
• Encouragement of creativity & individual
responsibility
“We’re giving people the latitude to go off &
do their own thing. We trust them to do
their regular jobs & to experiment, innovate
& have fun”
Microsoft Snr Mgr, quoted in Business Strategy Review

33. How Marketing Can Grab Hold of
Innovation Agenda
1. Harness people’s collaborative impulse
2. Meet expectations & leverage enthusiasms of
new generation
3. Exploit new tech … especially social media
4. Loosen up & embrace the chaos

34. Inexorable Rise of Social Media
• Penetration growth of social media across all
demographics & markets
• Increased expectation among stakeholders that they
should be able to debate issues & share ideas with
institutions across social media platforms
• Rapid adoption of social media by activist community as
a means of rallying support & generating publicity
• Increased client confidence in ability to deliver
communications objectives through social media
channels
… supported by accumulation of successful case studies

35. Ireland joining rest of world
in addiction to Facebook

36. Ireland developing a Twitter habit

37. Ireland yet to embrace blogging

38. Observations
• Irish public’s use of social media does not mirror
Ireland’s broadband/digital sophistication
• Private & public sector in Ireland has vested interest in
promoting use of social media
– Reduce costs
– Enhance public/customer engagement
– Open up new business opportunities
– Drive innovation

39. Role of Social Media
 Track sentiment & provide advance warning
 Rally supporters & mobilise/inspire internal audience
 Supercharge customer relations
Engage critics
Facilitate stakeholder involvement in product, policy or
service development
Sustain impact of other marcoms
Drive SEO performance
Measure effectiveness of/response to other comms

40. Smart campaigning … with social
media at its heart

41. Smart customer service … with
social media at its heart

42. Social Media-Powered Innovation
• PowerBrand Facebook game lets potential employees play at being
company execs (from marketing exec => global president)
• 21.8k Facebook fans, 161,000 monthly active users
• One of top 1k games on Facebook (out of 89k)

43. Building Incredibly Valuable
Customer Communities
RS Components built community
of 17,000+ electronics design
engineers from 139 countries in
only 3 months
36,000 members (lawyers) from
160 countries

44. Beware Fixation with Shiny Stuff

45. Boring is good
"Tools don't get socially
interesting until they get
technologically boring.“
Clay Shirky

46. Don’t get so carried away by
unlimited possibilities of social
media
… that you lose sight of real
business objectives

48. How Marketing Can Grab Hold of
Innovation Agenda
1. Harness people’s collaborative impulse
2. Meet expectations & leverage enthusiasms of
new generation
3. Exploit new tech … especially social media
4. Loosen up & embrace the chaos

50. Theory of Loose Parts*
• “In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness
and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are
directly proportional to the number and kind of variable
in it.”
• I.E. We all have potential to be creative, but that this
creativity is empowered in a looser, unstructured
environment & constrained by tight, highly structured,
controlled processes and environments
* Theory of Loose Parts, Simon Nicholson

51. Environment for Innovation
• Reinvigorated innovation process:
– Devolved decision making power from small group of
senior execs to network of cross-functional councils &
boards
= “a distributed idea engine where leadership emerges organically,
unfettered by a central command” Fast Company
– Focus on agility & speed
“all the windows of opportunities I’ve missed – areas that got
ahead of us that we couldn’t get back into without doing big
acquisitions or something – have been when I’ve moved too slow”
Cisco Systems, CEO John Chambers
• Business plans that used to take six months to
develop and approve, can now be put together in a
week

52. Environment for Innovation
• Granted 2,000+ worldwide patents
• “The most innovative company in
America” Fast Company
• Consistently ranked as one of the
best places to work
• No job titles, formal hierarchy or
organisational charts
• Teams self organise around specific projects

53. Willing to Fail
“We avoid failure at all costs and cling to ideals like
‘order’ and ‘efficiency.’ But we must embrace
failure, we must glory in the very murk and muck
and mess that yield true innovation” Re-imagine, Tom Peters
“Remember, we celebrate our
failures. This is a company where it’s
absolutely OK to try something that’s
very hard, have it not be successful,
and take the learning from that.”
Eric Schmidt

54. Beware Over Reliance
on Marketing Science
“Trying to research new category ideas is pretty
near impossible since people are notoriously bad at
predicting whether they will adopt new behaviours
in the future & generally reject such changes as
alien & odd” John Kearon, CEO BrainJuicer

55. Beware Over Reliance
on Marketing Science
“The biggest brand of them all,
Coke, was built not from market
analysis but by a potty pharmacist
brewing medicinal tonic in his back
yard using nothing more than
instinct and a three-legged brass
kettle.”
Mark Ritson, Marketing magazine, 20th May 2009

56. Mavericks Wanted
• Innovation driven by intuition +
passion rather than ‘marketing
science’
• True breakthroughs ignore
consumer’s declared needs
i.e. the antithesis of ‘good’ marketing
Marketers need to think more like
designers or inventors

57. Thinking like a Designer
• “In a global economy, elegant design
is becoming a critical competitive
advantage. Trouble is, most business
folks don't think like designers”
Professor Roger Martin, Rotman School of Management
• Design Thinking
– Observation + Analysis + Intuition
• MFA more valuable than MBA

58. The Irish Advantage
• Innovation more likely to come from small units … away
from corporate HQ
• Commitment from Irish Government to
make Ireland a global innovation hub”
• Structural advantages
– Favourable demographics
= a Generation Y economy
– High educational standards
– English/American language & literary heritage
– Diaspora
– Technological sophistication

59. www.crowdsurfing.net
#crowdsurfing