SCHMITTblog

Lots of Creativity, Little Innovation

Carlo Fei, as he dropped me off with his Audi back at my hotel, after a dinner and ride through Milan, made a great off-the-cuff remark, “There’s lots of creativity here, but little innovation.” He’s so right about this distinction between creativity and innovation, and Milan this week is a perfect showcase.

I had been giving a couple of presentations at Bocconi, the business school, to students and executives on experience. I had also stopped by briefly at parts of the Salone Internationale del Mobile, perhaps the most important design and furniture trade show in the world (http://www.cosmit.it). Lots of creativity there, especially outside the big trade location at the cutting-edge Zona Tortona, or in the inner city where fabulous projects happened between retailing and designers. Creativity, yes. Installations, thought pieces, animations of ideas – really weird, sweet, stylish stuff; but little innovation in actual furniture design.

I also stopped by, as I always do when in Milan, in the retail fashion district (Via Monte Napoleone, Via della Spiga, you know). Still all branding, and little customer experience! Moreover, luxury brands have extended their lines into furniture (stores), and flowers (stores), and chocolates (stores), and hotels, and some have done all of it (see Armani). There are brand accessories stores (see Ferrari), flagship stores, pop-up stores. But they are all stores (or, alright, hotels) plastered with the brand name, designed by this-and-that designer—yet, with the usual opening hours and salespeople and merchandise. Frankly, there has been far more innovation in customer service, customer interactivity, and in merchandising by mass-market retailers than luxuryretailers. Think of some of the classics: Apple Store, Whole Foods, American Girls Place. Luxury brands have been, sadly, followers of mass-market brands; shouldn’t they be leading? Not surprisingly, the research that Carlo conducted with his firm on the retail experience shows that many luxury stores in key cities (not just Milan) fall short of providing a great customer experience.

Recommendation

Check out:  www.Commoncraft.com

They have great simple tutorials for all sort of new technologies (from podcasts to twitter).

BRITE conference (this week)

I will be speaking this week on Big Think, and leading an interactive session for CMOs on sourcing big ideas, as part of the BRITE '08 conference and CMO summit on branding, innovation, and technology, at Columbia Business School, this Thursday and Friday, Feb 7-8th.

BRITE '08 is part of a major initiative by my Center on Global Brand Leadership at the school.  The event will bring together big thinkers from business, technology, media, and marketing to discuss how technology and innovation are transforming the ways that companies build and sustain great brands.

Topics include: social networks, user-generated content, viral campaigns, B2B branding, driving innovation inside and outside the organization, ROI for online marketing, TV 2.0, online content platforms, brands that thought big in 2007

Fellow speakers include:
    * Marty Homlish (Global Chief Marketing Officer, SAP)
    * Craig Newmark (Founder, Craigslist)
    * Patia McGrath (Global Director of Innovation, GE)
    * Bob Greenberg (Global Chief Creative Officer, R/GA)
    * Andrew Miller (CEO, Quattro Wireless)
(full speaker list)

Conference registration is here.  There is also a BRITE blog, wiki, and more fun things to explore.

I hope you can join us!

-Schmitt

Kill your sacred cow

Just contributed a blog, called "kill the sacred cow" to Columbia Business School's new blogging site.   Check it out here.

-Schmitt

Product Endorsement: Spotme

I normally don’t do product endorsements, but this innovative device is terrific. Spotme is a convenient PDA for conference participants.  I had the chance to experience it last week while speaking at Ascent, the Siemens Business Leadership conference. 

Spotme keeps the conference audience up-to-date in real time about the agenda and presentations.  It also allows you to send messages and exchange business cards electronically. Its coolest feature is this: at the start of the event, you can choose who you would like to meet from the list of attendees.  Then, throughout the event, whenever one of these people comes nearby to you, the Spotme device spots the person, and you get a vibrating alarm sound, with their picture.  Love it!

iPhone’s Smart Price Slash

Apple drew a lot of shocked responses when it announced last week that it would slash prices on the uber-hyped iPhone, from $599 to $399.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple’s stock price took a hit from nervous investors.  And my “early-adopter” friends who paid full price last summer for this gorgeous gizmo must have been wincing at the news.

But I think the market got it wrong. This isn’t bad news for Apple at all. The iPhone was never supposed to be another iPod -- a breakthrough product that redefined a category (digital music players) and transformed its customer reach (from engineering students to the music-loving masses).

The iPhone represented a very different strategy: an extremely well-designed new offer intended to help Apple get a foot into a large and mature (i.e. price-sensitive) market,  cellular phones.

The cut in the iPhone's price makes sense for Apple’s ambitions. As Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, told the Journal:

"The bottom line: Apple is investing iPhone profit dollars over the next few quarters in order to be a legitimate player in the phone market," Mr. Munster wrote in a report.

Apple was smart to cash in on the iPhone’s hyper-buzz this summer (though it’s thoughtfully offering a $100 coupon for its customers who bought the full-price bullet).  But with Holiday Season 2007 approaching, Apple may be able to use a less stratospheric price to achieve some meaningful penetration in the cell phone market.

At only $399, I would even consider buying one.

-David Rogers

Can creativity be learned?

When I run corporate workshops and seminars, I am often struck by the lack of creativity and creative individuals in companies.  And that at a time when every company wants innovative, disruptive, bold ideas.  On the other hand, the argument in most of the management  literature is that everybody can be creative: creativity can be learned.  (I realize part of the argument is driven by the desire to sell books to creativity-deprived managers, but let’s take the argument for what it is.)

Yes, creativity can be learned – but it is hard.  It certainly does not happen over night, by jumping on trampolines, listening to an inspirational pianist in the middle of a conference room playing tacky tunes, or drawing a face, one stroke at a time, as part of team work. I have seen such creativity-stimulating tools in action, and they don’t work.

They don’t work because creativity is sort of like language.  In part it may be inborn: creativity requires “storing extensive specialized knowledge in the temporoparietal cortex,” and we must be “capable of frontal mediated divergent thinking, and have a special ability to modulate the frontal lobe-locus coeruleus (norepinephrine) system, such that during creative innovation cerebral levels of norepinephrine diminish,” says Dr. Kenneth Heilman, an expert on creativity and the brain.  And it requires the right environment to stimulate neural development – such as a stimulating environment and organizational infrastructure that combine work with play.  So, an off-shore one-day workshop will not do.  Organizational change (in attitude, thinking style, structures and processes) is needed.

In fact, at one point in our lives, we were all creative: when we were allowed to play as children, when we were using smashed cola cans to play soccer, when we were building sand castles on the beach.  Soon after, we are subjected to the process of socialization which eradicates most of the playfulness required for creativity.   Yet some of us (perhaps the “undersocialized”) remain excited like children.  For the rest, learning to be creative as an adult, while working in a corporate environment, is like second-language acquisition.  You can do it, but you will always have an accent.

We Map the World

Just when I was starting to think that social media (“user-generated content”) are destined to give us little more than an ocean of self-description (party photos, MySpace profiles, and favorite band lists)… something comes along and surprises me.

Like the recent New York Times article about the rise of map mash-ups (“With Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking” 7/26/07).

I’ve actually used one of these for over a year. OnNYturf (http://www.onnyturf.com/subway/) has taken Google’s map of New York City and overlaid it with a map of the city’s subway system.  So the next time you need to find your way to an unobvious address (say… 200 Henry Street), all you have to do is type it into this site and zoom around to see which subway stop is closest (East Broadway on the F train), whether there are any other options (Delancey Street on the J, M, or Z aren’t much further), and what train connections you might make to get there.

The Times reports that by opening up their online map platforms to users, Google’s My Maps service and Microsoft’s Collections are allowing people to create millions of maps, showing mountain bike rides, biodiesel fueling stations in New England, even a map that shows the spread of graffiti within the town of Federal Way, WA.  Location-tagged photos from Flickr can be pulled in too, to add ground-level photos to a new map mash-up.  The total result, dubbed the GeoWeb, is turning into a project that might rival Wikipedia in its usefulness and collaborative spirit.

-David Rogers

[Read the full NYTimes article]

White Food

Today I got my second and final Brite Smile tooth whitening here in Singapore. Originally, I wanted to do Lasik eye surgery, but a Singaporean friend and brand consultant protested, saying “Schmitt without glasses is a brand travesty.” So I at least treated myself to white teeth.   Now, I have teeth like a movie star, as the lady at the front desk of my service apartment put it.

I am also on a strict 24-hour diet of white and clear food only: bananas, milk, water, rice, apples (no peels), white bread, white fish etc.  It’s interesting when you suddenly have to use an unfamiliar categorization scheme when you enter restaurants and supermarkets.  But it’s fun too.  And it sensitizes me to color in food.  Try for yourself. Eat purple on Monday, and black on Wednesday, and see how you feel. Or only round food on Tuesday, and triangular food on Thursday.  It’s not that easy to find what you need – but it stretches your mind and may boost your creativity.

Daimler sells Chrysler: Now what's going to happen with the Mercedes brand?

Just flew from New York to Milan to give a speech at the World Marketing and Innovation Forum organized by HSM: http://www.hsm-us.com/  I had lots of fun reading the articles about Daimler selling Chryler in the German press. They talk a lot about the huge financial loss for the German company, about executive hubris and about the Chrysler auto unions.  What I found curiously absent from the articles was a discussion of the future of the Mercedes brand.  The assumption seems to be that the company will do very well in the future because it is no longer distracted by Chrysler and can now fully refocus on one of its core brands. The only problem: the competition did not sleep -- namely, BMW and Audi.  So we will see if the Daimler managers can pull off a big-growth miracle with the Mercedes brand.