5 Questions That Kill Innovation: A How-to Guide

Despite all the press attention, academic philosophizing and consultant ramblings, Innovation is a bitch. Its a capricious, messy, disruptive practice whose outcome is unclear in the best circumstances. Sure, its standard fare in mission statements and press releases but smart managers know there are plenty of good reasons to delay or even destroy some eager beavers efforts at “innovation” within your company. Chief among these is to maintain your place in the corporate pecking order and a close second would be to ensure that your not “innovated” out of your familiar/comfortable routine by some acronym spewing upstart. There are many other reasons you might want to kill innovation within your firm, this post wont delve into the why of killing innovation as much as it seeks to address the how of killing innovation.

Amandrew Gate:A Lesson For Corporate Blogers

In the bowels of every media company on the planet there is a small group of ex-consultants, ex-bankers, corporate rejects and web 1.0 flame-outs, cooking up plans for Internet domination. Inevitably, one of the “innovators” in the group will “discover” a brand new phenomena sweeping the Internet called blogging and come up with the exciting idea of creating a network of blogs. They’ll sneer at the start-up competition and list all the resources and value they can add to a bloggers site. From a war chest full of money to a huge promotional budgets, they’ll map out how much money they’ll rake in selling ads or charging subscriptions to their massively popular walled gardens of creative goodness. Oh how very wrong they are.

The Long Tail of YouTube

(image from GapinVoid by hugh macleod)

Why is everyone is rushing to create the best walled garden for other peoples stuff? From their random musings, to their pictures and videos, it seems that everyone has bought into the idea that if you collect enough UGC (Unlikely to Generate Cash) a business will magically appear. The alchemist running UGC sites would have us believe that they can harness the magical powers of the Long Tail and transform UGC lead into advertising gold. While I’m no expert in the properties of power law distributions, nothing I’ve read about the Long Tail would indicate that a million audiences of one is the same as one audience of million.