I had the pleasure of attending the CTIA and the BBWF*Unwired conference as a speaker and panelist. While the attendance at both conferences was low due to the economic impact on travel and trade show budgets, access to key personnel of companies as well as to thought leaders in telecom and IT industries.
They confirmed that a lot of the news and insights that you usually get and consume as an innovator or a consultant for technology, product, or service innovation becomes present in the realm of corporate product innovation about four months later. Things we read about is reported as “news” in mainstream magazines about six to ten months later. But what’s even more alarming is the increasing amount of non-journalistic views taken at face value: Blogs become fact publishers, a quick blog post becomes “reporting” instead of an (intentionally) opinionated “shout out”. Seth Godin puts it to the point (as always):
Blogs have eliminated the reason for most business books to exist. If you can say it in three blog posts and reach more people, then waiting a year and putting in all that effort seems sort of pointless.
[…]
The irony? The market demands that you summarize your book in a blog post.
We’re hesitant to buy a book (which is a far better value than just about any form of media) if we don’t think we’re going to like it. I guess that’s built in from childhood, cause you get in trouble if you don’t finish a book, and who wants to finish a book they don’t like?
At least once a week, someone emails me a lousy review someone did of a summary of one of my books. Not the book, but what they thought the book was about based on a blog post summary of the book.
I a recent project engagement with Products & Innovation at Deutsche Telekom I had the pleasure to work with a very diligent client counterpart on a qualitative assessment for various In-Car services. A shout-out to my industry contacts (hello twitter, linkedin, skype, gmail, gvoice, gtalk, etc.) immediately got me back some really thoughtful feedback, but with the missing data and facts. My client counterpart pushed me to align secondary research results with my “professional gut feeling” and “professional guesstimate”. Digging through available data for innovation projects is difficult – how do you get market information like costs and revenues for a non-existing market? – but the exercise quickly revealed (again) how professional opinions are often influence by secondary or tertiary agendas. And these were the most interesting findings for my client.
Bottom Line:
1/
I will clearly mark my opinions as such (I wish there was a micro format for tagging opinions!)
2/
I will report on “old news” and share insights that I gained a couple of months ago, as for some people I might actually provide some new views or input on some topics.
That said, you will see some “older” things popping up again, that are (hopefully) nevertheless important for the industry in months ahead.
