A world without newspapers?

by Adam Hartung

We're rapidly becoming a quick-communication world. 140 characters is all we get on Twitter, and it's becoming the new "elevator pitch." Communication has moved from letters and phone calls to texting and Facebook. What we write, and say, is getting shorter. Book sales have declined for 4 years, and magazines are rapidly becoming an historical artifact. We rely on bloggers to read, digest, reformat and inform us quickly about what we want to know.

But, behind this, there has to be real fact gathering. Somebody has to report information as it happens, and dispense it. In many countries this was done by the government. But in the modern world we've relied on newspapers, and the wire feed services (AP, UPI, Reuters) that supply newspapers, to give us a lot of the raw news. Newspapers used ad revenue to pay for news acquisition, and they delivered the stream every morning.

But now, due to internet competition, newspapers are running out of cash. As people turn to the web for instant information advertisers have dropped newspapers. Subscriptions have fallen. And several newspaper companies, such as Tribune Corporation, have filed for bankruptcy. Many towns are at risk of losing the daily newspaper altogether. And employment has dropped to 1950's levels



So, what will be the prime source for information? Where will bloggers, and tweeters and web sites get the news if the newspapers disappear? Who is going to pay for field reporters, investigative reporters and correspondents in places far away - or dangerous like wars. The public has already bemoaned the lack of "news" in television news - which is more about pictures than news. And nowadays television news is dominated by opinion programs like "Countdown" or "The O'Reilly Factor."

It's clear that people want their information digitally - and mostly from the web. It's also clear that advertisers are drawn to the web with its far lower ad rates and specific, trackable ad placement. But what's unclear is where original news content will be created when the newspaper companies disappear. Even the most successful news web sites (Marketwatch.com and HuffingtonPost.com, as examples) depend largely upon information supplied them from wire feeds and newspaper sources for content.

A free society depends upon access to information. And nowhere is access more available than the USA. But unless there is some serious innovation in publishing, the system is at risk of collapse. Opinions will be as available as air, but if the original news sources dry up - what will everyone talk about? How will people - investors, voters, parents, politicians and others - obtain original information to become informed? Understanding what will replace the newspaper industry as a source of original news content is a difficult question to answer.

What will be the innovation that will keep the river of original, real time news flowing? In 2020, how will we be able to obtain information we can trust for accuracy?

The "media" industry is in big trouble. Large players, like News Corp., have seen profits decline - despite acquisitions like MySpace.com. GE recently agreed to sell NBC/Universal for less than it cost to create. But so far, few have figured out how make a profit from digital media as the market transitions away from print and television. While web sites proliferate, they produce less than 1/10th the revenue of old media.

Without some serious innovation, our news could soon be long on quantity - and very short on quality.


Editors Note: Apologies all around. This article from Adam Hartung was orignally supposed to be part of January's Innovation Perspectives, but I misplaced it. I hope you still enjoy it.


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Adam Hartung, author of "Create Marketplace Disruption", is a Faculty and Board member of the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, Managing Partner of Spark Partners, and writes for "Forbes" and the "Journal for Innovation Science."

Managing Your Innovation Gap

by Drew Boyd

Once you have a systematic and routine way to innovate, you are confronted with a new problem - how to decide how much innovation is enough. For many, this is an odd question. If innovation is essential for survival and growth, most people would want all the innovation they can get. But that is oversimplifying. Too much innovation can overload the system, confuse the organization, and lead to ideation fatigue. So how much is enough?

Here is a useful analysis that can tell you how many ideas are needed to reach your specific growth targets called "Mapping the Innovation Gap."

The steps are:

1. Determine your revenue goals in each year over a specific time horizon. Base this on your firm's strategic planning time horizon (usually 3 to 10 years depending on the industry). Use the actual revenue targets from your company's business plan.


2. Break these annual revenue targets down over a mix of products, new and existing, in each year. Some firms call this a revenue cascade or revenue waterfall. It shows for each year how much of the revenue comes from existing products and how much comes from new products.


3. Estimate your Innovation Yield (number of new ideas needed to produce one new product). This varies by industry and by company depending on factors such as level of investment, core competencies, and access to technology. Various think tanks and consultancies have estimates such as the curve pictured above.


4. Estimate your typical idea-to-launch Lead Time (how much time it takes to develop and launch a product once it is conceived). As with the Innovation Yield, this will vary. Take a look at past product development experience and determine an average time (in years).


5. Plot the number of new ideas needed in each year to produce the necessary new products in subsequent years. Take the number of new products needed in a specific year and divide it by the Innovation Yield. Then plot this number back in time by the amount of Lead Time to develop ideas.

What you end up with is the number of new ideas that need to be generated each year to have a realistic chance of achieving future revenue growth targets. It can be a sobering number depending on how aggressive your targets are. With this number, a general manager can then task the team to "schedule" innovation, and then hold them accountable for generating the necessary number of ideas.


Bottom Line: To grow, companies need a systematic innovation method, and it needs to be applied systematically.


Download "Mapping the Innovation Gap" here.

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Drew Boyd is Director of Marketing Mastery for Johnson & Johnson (Ethicon Endo-Surgery division). He is also Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati and Executive Director of the MS-Marketing program. Follow him at www.innovationinpractice.com and at http://twitter.com/drewboyd

Are you turning leads into sales?

by Matt Heinz

Leads alone mean nothing.

Leads don't equal revenue. By definition, leads are just prospective buyers who haven't yet bought a thing.

Marketers get upset when their executives think of them, and their budgets, as a cost center. But those same marketers often focus on generating leads, and that's it. They don't hold themselves accountable for the sale.

What happens after the lead is what's really important. So you have someone who qualifies as a prospective buyer. Maybe that prospect has even shown interest, shared a pain that you can ease.

They still need to buy. They will still have objections. Some may buy on their own, but most need to be walked through the sale.

Smart marketers know that leads are just the beginning. They know that their job isn't really done until leads buy.

Successful marketers go beyond setting a common definition for qualified leads with their sales counterparts. They also work with sales to define stages of the sales process, and develop tools to help sales reps sell, and make it easier for buyers to buy.

The best B2B marketers think, work and execute like they're in sales, not marketing. Because your sales reps know that generating the lead is at the top of their funnel, not the bottom.

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Matt Heinz is principal at Heinz Marketing, a sales & marketing consulting firm helping businesses increase customers and revenue. Contact Matt at matt@heinzmarketing.com or visit www.heinzmarketing.com.

Innovation Goal - Growth or Strategic Renewal?

by Rowan Gibson

What exactly is the goal of your company's innovation efforts? "Oh, that's easy", senior managers usually reply, "We need to grow the business." The line of logic here is relatively simple: "Innovation leads to wealth creation leads to growth" - which, of course, is fair enough. Based on this logic, companies of every stripe are now racing to pursue the kind of innovation that generates organic growth, new revenues, and wider profit margins.

However, while it's clear that these goals are absolutely critical and that innovation is the only viable option left for attaining them, the case for innovation actually goes a lot deeper than that. Indeed, there's an inherent danger to focusing most of a company's innovation efforts on growing the top line or improving profits (e.g. by cutting more costs out of the system). The danger is that product innovation or operational innovation may take overwhelming priority over innovation at the level of the core business strategy. In most cases, these more superficial kinds of innovation lead only to short-lived success, and in the worst case they may be followed by disastrous failure.

Take Kodak, for example. Back in the 1980's, the company launched the single-use, disposable film camera. It was a radical innovation that made Kodak a ton of money through the 90's and right into the early years of the 21st century. At one point, over 200 million of these cheap and cheerful little cameras were being sold each year, representing an incredible 20% of all photographic sales. So, did innovation lead to wealth creation lead to growth? Of course it did.

Except that, next morning, photographic film was dead - or at least pushed from the mainstream to the margins - as digital cameras and camera phones became ubiquitous. Kodak has been struggling ever since.

In other words, innovating within the context of a company's existing business model can be a good thing, and for a while it can certainly push revenues and profits into a steep growth curve. But in an age when disruptive change happens at breakneck speed, business models have a much shorter shelf life than ever before.

Consider the telecom industry. A few years back, most telecom companies were giving plenty of thought to innovation in things like products and pricing (coming up "friends and family" packages and so forth), but how many of them were thinking about telephony switching to a completely different kind of network - like VoIP?

Likewise, most airline companies were focused some years ago on how to innovate in things like their loyalty programs, or their onboard catering, or their First Class seating, but how many were thinking about the possibility of a completely new, low-cost business model for the airline business?

That's why the true challenge facing companies today is not growth; it's perpetual growth - it's ensuring that the organization continually prospers, year after year, decade after decade, despite massive and ever-increasing turbulence in the external environment. Companies need to develop the capacity to anticipate and adjust to the fundamental change forces at work in the world, dynamically reinventing their core business models and strategies as circumstances alter, and as new threats and opportunities emerge.

A company that has done this really well is Britain's Tesco. Over the decades, Tesco has not only continuously innovated within its traditional supermarket business, but has also feverishly innovated around its core business model - adding a string of non-traditional businesses, from petrol sales in the mid-1970s to financial services, travel, legal advice, telecom and internet services, music downloads, gas and electricity, and online grocery today. This ability to perpetually reinvent itself and its industry has helped turn Tesco into one of the largest and most successful retailers in the world.

Here's the point: the conventional line of logic - "Innovation leads to wealth creation leads to growth" - is in urgent need of an update. Executives need to understand the deeper insight that "Innovation leads to strategic renewal leads to perpetual growth." Only by developing this understanding can companies fully appreciate the role that innovation should play in shaping their destinies. Only then will they commit to making radical changes in the core business itself, before the case for change becomes desperately obvious - as it has, for example, in the photography industry, or the telecom industry, or the airline industry, or the supermarket industry.

Perpetual growth requires perpetual renewal. It's the only way to maintain continuity in a discontinuous world. And the fuel for renewal is innovation. Not merely innovation at the margins but deep, strategic innovation at the level of the core business model.

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Rowan Gibson is a global business strategist, a bestselling author and an expert on radical innovation.