Strategist Nick Keppel-Palmer is in Fast Company this morning writing about how “Boundaryless” businesses multiply value. A version of the article originally appeared as part of our annual Game Changers report.
Nick says: “The brands that will have the greatest impact on all our lives are those that see themselves not as citadels that need defending but as causes that need joining. The most important, most effective, most impactful brands are those that have put petty competition behind them and embraced collaboration as an operating principle—it is their core DNA. These brands are clear about their ambitions and are not shy about seeking out others who share those ambitions.”
Knight-Mozilla OpenNews is a partnership aimed at driving open source innovation in news. When it started in the spring of 2011 it had an initial set of news partners that included the BBC, the Guardian, Zeit Online, the Boston Globe and Al Jazeera English. This morning I read that The New York Times, ProPublica, Speiegel Online, and Argentina’s La Nacion will also be joining.
It’s encouraging news for publishing, an industry this blog has repeatedly said needs its major players to embrace experimentation and co-creation if it’s going to develop new ideas for news presentation, delivery, and revenue-generation.
The formal announcement will be made at SXSW tomorrow, alongside a series of exhibits showcasing how open source projects are leading innovation in news, in areas like real-time visualizations, augmented video, data-journalism and HTML5 web tools.
One of OpenNews’s ambitions is to build bridges between journalists and hackers. It awards 8 fellowships annually and “embeds” each fellow at partner organizations, where they spend a year writing code in collaboration with reporters and newsroom developers. It’s fun, for example, to think about OpenNews fellow Cole Gillespie, a JavaScript developer born in the North Carolina Appalachians, becoming intimately familiar with the daily ebb and flow of Germany’s Zeit.
For participating newspapers, the project is an opportunity to try a different approach and expand their ecosystems (#boundaryless). For designers, developers and content creators, it’s about creating and supporting a community where the web is studied as it gets made. Since its creation, other groups like Hacks/Hackers have emerged that share a similar goal.
According to OpenNews’s site, they’ll soon be sponsoring “hackdays” where people can write code that helps to solve real-world journalistic problems. They’re also working on a site called “Source,” where free case studies, walkthroughs, tutorials, and code snippets will be available. We’ll keep an eye out for this and write about it when it exists.
When I was last in São Paulo, we did some workshops for a wonderful bunch of designers. Our task was, in just one day, to create a brand for a co-op of people who collect rubbish from landfill sites for recycling. As an organization it’s a model in terms of democracy, collaboration, support and idealism. The profit is shared equally between all the workers, all the way up to the president.
People who would be otherwise excluded from society, can get work, can get a sense of pride in doing something so crucial to the planet. On the day, we all created an idea that would help them focus as an organization and some routes for the visual language. After the event, one of the routes was selected and then further developed here at Wolff Olins London.
Have a look at the result. The overall idea is about recycling lives.
That is based on the notion that besides recycling materials, the co-op creates new opportunities for people, for communities and for the environment.
The visual language tells the story of transforming waste into opportunities.
Richard Canny is a very smart guy when it comes to cars and especially electric vehicles. He’s been a big cheese at Ford as well as CEO of Think, the funky EV company - he has been both David and Goliath.
The announcement by BMW’s sales and marketing chief that the carmaker is no longer just an auto company is yet more evidence that brands are changing what they do to serve more of the needs of their existing constituents.
By launching the DriveNow car-share service for people who want short-term access to a car without the responsibility of owning one, BMW is expanding its role to meet the needs of a changing world – no longer looking for just shareholder return but shaping the way we live our lives (in this case in mobility).
Business is no longer about making something and finding as much market share as you can, it’s about establishing relationships with customers and expanding what you do to serve more of their needs – think of it as share of wallet, not share of market. And it entails a way of working which is fundamentally collaborative, not competitive – it’s a new way of doing business.
If even BMW is starting to think like this then this will fast become a movement.
“I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money”
Is collaboration better than competition? I think it probably is when taken as a fundamental business operating system i.e. when brands that share a common belief get together to explore new opportunities together.
What we mean by collaboration as an operating model is a root and branch rethink of the way business actually works – away from a market share driven approach to something based around share of wallet.
Old school thinking:
Define a competitive position and defend it
Grow by increasing market share i.e. selling what you do to more people
Keep resources such as smarts, technology, talent to yourself (see them as a source of competitive advantage)
New school:
Define the role you play in people’s lives and seek out others who share that role
Grow by increasing share of wallet i.e. extend what you do in order to meet the needs of your constituents
Share resources with other like minded organisations who share the same belief system – who share your aims
Adidas + 2012 not Ebay + Skype Bono + RED not Will.I.am + Intel Tata Docomo not Nokia Microsoft
Maybe it’s a new way to think about collaboration – a match based on belief rather than capability. A union based on love rather than convenience?
Last week one of the UK’s brightest stars got snuffed out. Modec was a maker of funky electric commercial vehicles – near silent delivery trucks that the likes of Tesco, UPS and FedEx had started using. (You really have to look both ways before crossing the roads nowadays).
Electric Vehicle technology may not provide all the answers to sustainable mobility – but few will deny that it’s a pretty important area. But the most interesting and forward thinking players are small, starved of capital and seemingly perpetually teetering on the brink. ThinkEV, Tesla, BetterPlace, REVA – all really exciting companies, all well respected, none of them more than niche. Meanwhile the mass manufacturers like Renault see Electric Vehicles as a source of future differentiation and therefore something to be protected and defended at all costs. Getting all paranoid about putative Chinese spies under the bed.
Why get so competitive about it? Why not collaborate? The world needs sustainable mobility, and the means to achieving it stretch way beyond the resources of one company. Think how much more the auto industry could achieve – together – if all the players dropped their ‘default competition’ mode and started thinking in ‘default collaboration’ mode. The most forward thinking brands in the world are those that understand clearly the role that they play, rather than obsess about the ‘position’ they are defending.They seek out partners who share their aims and they work with them to achieve their common aims. Think Boots and Macmillan; M&S and Oxfam; Kate Moss & Topshop; Nokia and Microsoft; Tata and Docomo; iphone and google maps; and even Heston Blumenthal and Little Chef. This is the end of competition as a business model.
Getting electric vehicles into the mass day-to-day market requires a massive sharing of resources (smarts, technology and money) if it’s going to happen at anything more than a snail’s pace. And we need it - fast. Fuel prices are heading skywards. But without a fundamental change of thinking in the boardrooms of the automotive oligopoly it won’t happen fast enough.
I hope Modec is an exceptional case. I fear it isn’t.
Gap is looking to reconnect with today’s customer and become even more relevant. It needs to offer customers something that’s different, like the SoCal youth of Hollister or the edgy attitude of All Saints.
Gap has been about all-American basics and, in recent years, brands like American Apparel have done basics in a fun and sexy way. But are we tiring of the ‘all-American’ story? Gap needs more than just iconic American style to get people excited.
Crowd-sourcing new ideas in the wake of such heavy criticism could be their saving grace but co-creating logos feels so limiting in the grand scheme of collaboration.
By engaging in dialogue with the customer, Gap has a real opportunity to get under the skin of its brand and its customer, right now it doesn’t seem to know or understand them. This co-creation shouldn’t be just about logos but about its role in people’s lives.
It would be great to see this project go beyond image and start to act as a platform for participation, from create your own iconic t-shirts through to suggestions for future collaborations. Gap has a heritage in doing so with designers like Valentino and ranges like [RED] so there is something to build on and take further.
It’s time for Gap to be bold and brave with its future. It needs to stand out confidently with a new story to tell. Today’s news of Gap scrapping the logo shows a brand that is willing to engage and listen to its customers. After all in today’s world brand is less about what you say and more about what Google says it is. Some may argue the move has damaged their brand and its credibility in social media but by acting quickly they have an opportunity to do something more valuable than a logo competition.
In a collaboration with Wolff Olins and AOL’s music website, Spinner, AOL hosted four free pop-up shows during the South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas. Broken Bells kicked off the series on March 17, followed by Rogue Wave on March 18, VV Brown on March 19, and Rival Schools on March 20. It was surely an exciting weekend for art and music lovers. Times and locations were revealed the day before each performance on Spinner, AOL music’s SXSW hub, the Spinner Facebook Fan Page, and to Spinner / SXSW Twitter followers.
The posters were designed by WO and were beautifully screen printed by D&L Screen Printing of Seattle, a legend in the grunge music scene.
The spirit of this collaboration truly lies in the heart of AOL. Connecting with the latest in art and culture is an important aspect of their brand and one they aim to bring to their readers.
