Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

Zeus Jones & Sierra Bravo Win Phizzpop Final

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Kudos to the teams at Zeus Jones & Sierra Bravo for taking the finals at Phizzpop at South by Southwest (SXSW). Stiff competition from top designers in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Miami, Austin (TX) and San Francisco…but they nailed it.

The PhizzPop Design Challenge is a web design and development competition. This year PhizzPop expanded from in-person agency challenges to include an online competition for web professionals.

The PhizzPop Tour stopped in seven cities across the U.S. This is the design event of the year — a prestigious design competition combined with a social gathering for top web professionals, brands, designers and developers. You can learn more at the PhizzPop site here.

Two videos below: the Zeus Jones/Sierra Bravo winning pitch…and an interview Minnov8’s Phil Wilson did with Christian Erickson, partner in Zeus Jones and the guy that was on stage pitching the combined team’s work to win the event.

Technologists Fear Not, for Everything is GR8!

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gr8-surge-imageLook no further than the headlines to discover reasons to just give up.  The Today Show on NBC this morning hyped the question of whether or not we’re on the edge of another great depression.  Yesterday, the market tanked and brushed against its lowest levels since 1997.  By now, almost all of us know someone that has been laid off or otherwise negatively impacted in this economy.  But another Great Depression, really!?!

There’s nothing “great” about a depression and in fact there is no definition of a depression.  Economists are only able to assess whether a depression (might have) occurred after the fact, and it’s typically identified by negative 10% GDP over several quarters.  Instead of carrying needless worry about falling into a depression, let’s just assume we’re in one right now.  Let’s call it the GR8 Depression – my nod to us thumb-pecking mobile text’ers and web 2.0 aficionados.

O.K.  So now that we’re in the GR8 Depression, what does that mean?  The answer is resoundingly nothing!  We still have to get up early every morning, work hard, be productive, use our ingenuity, make miracles happen, go to bed, and repeat.  Let me be clear that cutting costs and scaling back is never a strategy…it’s a means to extend the way.  This is the GR8est time to be working on new technology because resource constraints drive resourcefulness and inventiveness.  Now is the time to take risks, because what is there really left to lose?  …  [Read More…]

Bigger ideas. Faster.

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generalmillsLarge and small companies around the world are using open Connected Innovation strategies to re-invigorate and accelerate their innovation capacity. This movement goes one step beyond the “submit your idea” generation and allows participants to engage in the product development experience.  Here are three examples of Connected Innovation commercially at work:

  • Starbucks built an on-line consumer community called MyStarbucks.com that facilitates open discussion of how to improve the Starbucks experience. Howard Schultz, CEO, claims that MyStarbucks.com has re-invigorated his innovation program by focusing business priorities on customer needs, like free Wi-Fi in all stores
  • Threadless.com won Inc. Magazine’s most innovative company award for 2008 for their “customer as company” business model. Threadless has never had a product intro bomb; they only produce what their customers want to buy
  • Dell Idea Storm is an example of a social media execution. Idea Storm was launched by Michael Dell with the goal of repairing its customer service credentials, but it changed the way Dell does business.  On Idea Storm, customers, programmers, and the like post their ideas for improvement or enhancement.  Due to the successful use of Connected Innovation strategy, Dell has been able to reduce their product development cycle time by 6 months.

Connected Innovation is the business process of using on-line tools like user communities, blogs, innovation portals and social media to mine, connect, and route ideas, employees, consumers, customers, vendors, brands, and technologies. More specifically, on-line communities, innovation portals, and social media strategies not only create new connections, but also allow the extraction of value from these connections.

My employer, General Mills, has given me the opportunity to explore the Connected Innovation concept. Over the course of the next six months, I will benchmark and research the best practices of leading organizations engaged in building connections to evolve their innovation capacity. My research will also provide a framework for building successful Connected Innovation web sites, both inside the corporate firewall and external to customers in a B-C relationship. I will also be a contributor for Minnov8, sharing insights collected along my journey.  I look forward to the opportunity to interview and collaborate with Fortune 500 companies, social media and innovation thought leaders, and the broader digital community.

During the coming months, you can connect with me here at Minnov8, at my personal blog “Perspectives on Connected Innovation and Collaboration”, and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/djsmith4. I am very interested in engaging in dialogue with you on this subject and look forward to connecting with the broader Minnov8 community.

Mayo Accelerates Their Online Presence

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sharingmayoMayo Clinic today announced the launch of what they’re calling its “culture blog”, Sharing Mayo Clinic, which provides an online site for patients and employees to share their stories about what makes Mayo Clinic unique. This WordPressMU delivered blog is clearly focusing on uplifting stories of individual patient and employee experiences. While initially interesting, I started to poke around since I wasn’t sure how this fit into their overall mission or why they’d want to have a showcase for patient and employee stories.

According to Mayo’s about page positioning this new blog, Each year over 500,000 unique patients from every U.S. state and nearly 150 countries come to Mayo Clinic for diagnosis and treatment. These patients and their families and friends, and 50,000 employees and students are part of a global Mayo Clinic community.

The goal for the Sharing Mayo Clinic blog is to provide a virtual place for this community to connect and share their experiences. It’s the online companion to the new newsletter for patients, also called Sharing Mayo Clinic, and is a hub that links to Mayo Clinic’s pages on other social networking sites, such as Facebook and YouTube.

Unless you’re a constant observer of Mayo Clinic, you may be as surprised as I was to learn how truly significant and holistic the Mayo online presence has become, and how its online initiatives actually spring forth from the innovation DNA of the Mayo Clinic. This premiere healthcare organization is leveraging social tools to extend their reach and to ensure they’re at the points online where people are increasingly focusing their attention: the internet and web with a primary focus on social media applications….  [Read More…]

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 19

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m8_kmathenyOur kickoff podcast for 2009 is a discussion with guest Kevin Matheny, self-described “E-business Architect & Open API guy for Best Buy” and founder of the innovative Best Buy Remix Developer Network effort.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.

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The Podcast

Podcast: Download (Duration: 57:46 — 33.3MB)

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Our discussion surrounded a variety of topics:

– How did the idea to open up the Best Buy catalog come about? What is the vision for Remix?
– How does it fit with broader plans or strategies of the corporation?
– Can you talk about how you came to select Mashery as your API delivery partner?
– What about higher level tools to increase access to the Remix API?

As you may have heard, a guy by the name of Keith Burtis (based in Buffalo, NY) was just hired to be community manager of the Remix program and is running the Twitter presence. During this podcast, we discussed the role of the community manager, what Keith is doing, and why it matters.

Links:

+ Kallow.com

+ Blog:  http://remix.bestbuy.com/blog

+ Twitter:  http://twitter.com/bestbuyremix

+ Kevin’s article, Agile Software Development: Bridges to the Future in BusinessWeek.

+ Follow @kevinmatheny on Twitter here.

Marketing Innovation: Best Buy vs. Target

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bbclogoTwo of the most difficult marketing jobs in Minnesota right now has to be leading local retail giants Target and Best Buy. Although of different scales, Target is about 60% larger than Best Buy, each is facing the same catastrophic pullback in consumer spending that has resulted in each company reporting some of their worst results in years. How each deals with the gloomy outlook in 2009 will be interesting to watch and I expect to see some innovation in their marketing strategies that will help them ride out this tough economy.

As we’ve written here before, Best Buy is one of the leaders in the adoption of social media in the retail industry. Their CMO, Barry Judge, has started blogging and has taken to Twitter. He’s very transparent in his exploration of conversational marketing in interviews like this one. But probably the best overview is a video we posted here last month that features an interview with Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson who clearly is behind their use of social tools and techniques.

Target, in contrast, is opaque on all things social and their CMO, Michael Francis, seems from the corporate model of a brilliant planner, not innovator. Although they have been involved in conversational marketing — I recall meeting blogger Robert Scoble some 3 years ago after a day of meetings at Target — their efforts to date have been mixed. A well planned Facebook campaign was marred by controversy. And there was that episode with bloggers who took issue with a billboard in New York. Not the kind of case studies you would want from a company who clearly is a leading force in retail brand advertising.

So I will be tracking each company and their marketing efforts over the next several months and posting highlights here. If past is prologue, my gut tells me we’ll be seeing a lot of innovation from Best Buy, particularly in their use of social media. But the folks at Target might also surprise us. In these difficult times, the most innovative will likely win.

Great (Meerman) Scott! What a Social Media Breakfast!

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The monthly meeting of the Social Media Breakfast of Minneapolis-St.Paul, held at the PartnerUp Headquarters, also known as Deluxe, was anchored by author/marketer David Meerman Scott on Friday (10/29).

Following opening comments from SMBMSP head cheese, Rick Mahn, Minnov8’s own Graeme Thickins, who coordinated Meerman Scott’s appearance, introduced the online media evangelist to a packed room.

The bulk of his presentation centered around the need for companies to adopt social media and interactive methods of marketing for one simple reason…that’s where customers go to find what they’re looking for. He noted that whenever he asks any group, organization, or gathering what their habits are, when it comes to finding what they want, the web always impacts nearly 100% or them, yet marketers still cling to those methods (direct mail, mass media, etc.) that have much less impact.

He calls the activity of using online and social media marketing as “Spreading the message by word of mouse.” There is a clear need for businesses, individuals, and marketers alike to “think like a publisher” citing that, “We are what we publish.” What reason is given most often as to why a company or individual can’t do that? “We’re a ________! We can’t do that!” where the blank represents a company’s business practice or product.
…  [Read More…]

Science Museum Could Be Minnesota’s Tech Secret

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The Science Museum of Minnesota held another of its Web Seminars on Tuesday, October 7th.  For many, the SMM has become a valuable resource as they seek to get up to speed, learn a new skill, or discover “what all the fuss is about” in the computer world. To others it could very well be a secret.

The SMM houses a Computer Education program that never fails to impress me. I first discovered them about two years ago when I made the decision to merge my traditional media experience with the “new” media world. They offer an incredible array of classes that cover everything from an introduction to computers (Absolutely Terrified of Computers) to network management, HTML, PHP, and a whole host of software training. I’ve found these classes to be concise and very hands on. All taught by incredibly well prepared…and patient…educators at a very reasonable rate.

Throughout the year they host seminars that take on various topics related to web development and design. The topic for this gathering: Refresh Your Pages. Presentations included Maintaining Your Website, PDF Accessibility For All, Benefits of Business Blogging, and Flash at its Finest. These free presentations were made by both SMM staff and guests and, as noted in the photo, attracted a full room of participants. I was particularly interested in the accessibility information as I often find myself short-cutting the process.

I’m always excited to see who shows up at these events. I always know a few faces from the world of tech, marketing, and project management but I also meet plenty of full and part-time designers there to pick up a tip or two. The best part; there are always new faces, people I don’t see at the many tech related gatherings I attend, who are just entering the online world. The guest presenters are also people I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting at other conferences. Getting to know all of them is always very heartening, because more people teaching and more people learning means more people participating online. And that means more opportunities for Minnesota innovation to proliferate.