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But the bad news is that all your competitors have also
started to innovate and they have raised the bar higher
than ever. There is no turning back and one will therefore
have to be even more imaginative, and that encompasses not
only creativity but also the innovation process. And frankly,
the way we handle the innovation process has hardly changed
at all these past few years, maybe it's time we should something
about it.
Innovation is therefore of paramount importance, and so
much so that even Tom Peters, of all people, the former
guru of re-engineering [2],
now encourages his audiences to 're-imagine' .
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act two: the web 2.0 accelerator aka marketing
through democracy
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In 2006 we were able to witness the advent of Web 2.0 in
the public; innovation had found its network and could eventually
go global. And besides, we are all in the driver's seat
now. Web 2.0 is supported through some sort of online democratic
marketing system which keeps all the pieces together. This
is the new face of the Internet which turns it into more
than a mere support; the Internet becomes in fact a real
platform for live interaction. But the trend extends beyond
the Internet in fact, since politics and even our social
experience requires more than words and forces us to convene
in unsual places, with unusual people and exchange.
Levine,
Locke, Searls & Weinberger were first to identify
that trend in their collective work 'The Clue Train manifesto',
still available for free from their cluetrain website. Every
day, the Web becomes a little more collaborative and is
fuelled by content generated by kits users (a process dubbed
UGC, user generated content, for that matter). Cheap
and easy access to broadband has made it possible, which
means that almost anyone can now hook on to the Internet
and grab useful and reliable information which was probably
generated, corrected and cross-linked with other sources
and also cross-checked by other users too. At the end of
the day, user-generated content is value-added content
[3].
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the
cluetrain manifesto by Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger |
But don't think that Web 2.0 will only have an impact on consumers,
B2B is also part of the picture with companies like Walt Disney
or Dresdner Bank as well as online ventures like www.salesforce.com
or www.facebook.com
are already using Web 2.0 approaches to manage their own internal
communities. The Web is now a web of people and no longer the
web of content that it used to be with 1.0. At the end of the
day, the web is becoming a virtual agora. Similarly, when it comes
to managing innovation, companies which used to manage skills
are now beginning to think of innovation in terms of expertise
[both inside and outside their own playground]. But the biggest
change that Web 2.0 could bring is likely to bring is that concerning
the way that we have to question and re-invent those marketing
theories with which we used to find so comfortable and reassuring
because they were designed at a time when the world was deemed
predictable. Of course, we still need them for the basics, but
they are no longer sufficient to prepare us for playing against
the new rules of this game or when it comes to raise the stakes
and conquer new positions.
Web 2.0 will/does turn customer-brand relationships upside down,
but it will also impact relationships between employees and the
hierarchy if not the very idea of a hierarchy. This will come
about with an emerging need for commitment, peer-to-peer communication
and even a need for a renewed and more participative form of democracy
[4]. It is already well
identified in the US [5],
where project leaders enjoy extraordinary visibility through the
various stakeholder communities and other practices with the help
of blog or wiki platforms. Launching important industrial projects
cannot be undertaken without the finest granularity in participation
[clients, employees and alliance partners: all bringing their
piece in the puzzle]... project design, analysis and communication
must be facilitated and implemented in very short periods of time.
This is why creating and facilitating virtuak communities are
now essential when it comes to generate differentiation in a market.
Some already hire or plan to hire brand afficionados from the
open Internet world to grow and facilitate their client communities.
Will we call them Chief Community Officers, who knows?
2.0 will undoubtedly topple the barriers between managers and
their teams and may even do the same between your company, its
partners and its customers. Web 2.0 will amplify the phenomenon
where creation is no longer generated from within a company but
on its fringe or even outside its walls.
The whole chain that creates value added will be modified so
that clients will become members of a community responsible for
the collective production of innovations.
continued on part 3
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