Please get out of the box into some boxes

Friday I was involved in an inspiration day for Sparekassen Kronjylland and besides doing an ideation session with them at the end of the day, I had the pleasure of opening the day with a short presentation on how to work with creativity and innovation.  Earlier this year I did the same to our Aegis Media Client Board together with Morten Albæk from Danske Bank (now Vestas), and it hits me how interesting it is every time you have to sit down and reflect on this subject.

One issue I spend some time thinking about is how much it annoys me every time I hear people say “let’s do some brainstorming” or ”we really need to think out of the box here”, as these often just represent a lot of people wasting their time sitting and talking in all kind of directions with no goal besides from the “hotness” of being creative.  In the best case they waste a lot of time, in the worst case they spend this time convincing each other on the implementation of a stupid idea, which in the end will cost the company a lot of money. 

Brainstorming isn’t just something you do. It is a difficult, structured and strategic discipline. And it isn’t just done in the moment of facetime between colleagues. It has to be planned, ignited and facilitated in a useful way by people being sharp and precise on the goals of the exercise, as well as the company’s objectives for initiating this activity.

Brainstorming out of the box is often just crazy ideas, with no objective, often off brand and off strategy. So please stop calling creativity in the name of “out of the box-thinking” and start focusing on how to create frames, boxes and structures to better create true creativity. It does have to be a colored room or a green hat or so. It could just be a simple way to enhance the effect of combining skills, a structure which makes it easier to talk about this or a simple planning process that ensures that all angles and combinations in an idea or a concept can be easily explored, prototyped or evaluated up against the overall objectives. Because in the end innovation and creativity isn’t worth much if it doesn’t help fulfill the objectives set for the company.

Playstation Home is live in public beta

Here’s the trailer, with pictures and explanation on what this universe is all about. Looks very familiar for people who’s been traveling second life a while ago:) This launch being a huge stake for Sony, it will be interesting to see if the platform can stand the hype and thereby criticism always following. Looking very much forward to follow the discussion during the weeks to come.  More on Playstation Home on Wikipedia.

Red Bull is the first advertiser entering the universe, with a branded island with activities for the users in a branded context. Diesel and Paramount Pictures are also throwing their brands into this new world. Read full post about this at Adverblog

iNap

 

This is cool… A new App from my favorite store. This is cool. Using the GPS in iPhone to wake the commuting people when they are near their destination.

Simple, logical and brilliant. This is going on my “ideas I wish I have had list”

Google is celebrating their 10th birthday

I think this is really cool, and I stumbled upon it on Faris Yakob’s Blog

Faris writing: To celebrate their 10th birthday [10 years from 2 guys and an algorithm to masters of the universe] Google have announced Project 10¹⁰⁰

The project is crowdsourcing for positive change: anyone can submit an idea to help the world and the one that Google thinks will help the most people, they will fund with $10 million. It’s an audacious and excellent way to celebrate Doing No Evil for ten years. 

I think crowdsourcing is an interesting thing and looking at the rates of change and adoption rates for even what seems to be odd, groundbreaking innovation, it is getting clear that one company can’t idea develop all by them self, if this is the pace that companies as Google sets (using the whole world as their R&D department)

Inspiring…

Branded services

The appstore opens a whole new world for branding. Easy to use, easy accessible and highly relevant connections with the consumer. The apps create a space for engaging the consumers on their terms and a new race has opened. The race for developing the most inviting, intriguing, innovative and involving app. So I will kickstart the race here and ask everybody to send comments with branded apps they have seen or heard about. Also ideas for cool apps that could have had a perfect sponsor or sender on it. Please participate. This could be quite fun and interesting .

Posting from ipod touch

This is my first post from my iPod touch . I have to admit that I haven’t been blogging much lately but there is an explaination beyond the perfect Danish summer weather.
I fell in love with app store!!!!
After I bought the new software for the touch and got access to app store I been discovering the hidden world of crazy apps and very usefull apps . Even though it hurts me that I haven’t got the iPhone yet this makes it easier. So I spend a lot of time – and money – testing different apps to get a feeling of what’s going on. I especially see the potential for utilities such as shopping lists, spending/budget apps, exchange rates and all everyday tools. Of cause gaming is huge to and so are social networking tools.
I just downloaded the wordpress app 5 min ago so perhaps this means I’m back in the blogosphere.

Interactive shop windows

 

 

I have to blog about this special innovation, which just went live 72 meters from the agency in Aarhus. In a world where we are hunting down new connections with our precious consumers, the shop and the experiences there, play a key part in the communication process. CAVI in Aarhus has been working on a solution for three years where the shop window interacts with the people passing by.

Here is the description of the Dynamically Transparent Window from CAVI’s website:  

A Dynamically Transparent Window responds to the movements of people passing by. Using a camera, passers-by are tracked, and the data is processed by a system that controls custom-built interactive windows on the facade. The windows are fitted with so-called electro-chromatic foil that can change from opaque to transparent when an electric current runs through it. By using thin strips of the foil, narrow bands on the facade change in order to reveal what is on display in the store when people walk by the window. The facade uses various interaction modes in order to lure the by-passers near and make them explore the display. 

And here the Youtube video explaining the details:

Reminds me a bit about a Tomato project I saw at an evening inspiration session at LYNfabrikken where they did some work interacting with the passing by’s. I think it was with Asahi TV and with another project working with air to flow to giant sculptures when passing them. (If anybody remembers exactly – please help )

But this is interesting and I just held a focusgroup working with a pitch for H&M in Denmark where all the young women talked about how important the shopping window were for them. So this is interesting. Hope they will tell more about the results and reactions afterwards. 

The Magnum Challenge

I clicked on a banner yesterday!

I was placed on trendsales I guess. Doing my early in the morning shopping with my laptop on top of my bed while my boyfriend was still sleeping. (and here I am again) This is my favorite time slot. The sun is up, the house is quiet and there is time to do online shopping on my favorite sites amazon, trendsales, youheshe, reading blogs, news and checking out the weather on the day to come.   

This is the perfect spot to expose me for this banner. Do you want to dream. Oh yes! Do you want luxury and being spoiled? Yes please. Click this banner! Ok I will. And I ended up on this page the magnumchallenge.dk. And I don’t now how much was fascination over the beautiful pictures, the interactive twist’s or just that I was in the right situation to start dreaming, but anyway I ended up spending 10 minutes or more on the campaign site. And I had fun. And I don’t even like Magnum icecream. But this definitely took my ten steps closer to try. 

So I don’t now if it was perfect media planing finding me in this situation, the endorsment from the desperate housewife universe, the pictures of luxury and the opening to dream, but this campaign worked for me – or for the advertiser in deed. 

Google as content provider

Google just entered a new era. Google News now launching whole articles of news content.  It is actually the news providers who forced Google to do this by making them pay for content instead of appreciating the links from Google. Instead of driving traffic it now steals traffic, because if all content is collected on google why go further on to the specific site? Why place ads on the site then? Now content – and thereby the ad spend  is collected on the must powerful aggregator the world have ever seen. I think the news providers just forced Google to be their biggest enemy! 

Guardian writes..

“Publishers: Be careful what you wish for. Journalistic organisations
and news agencies have complained that Google has benefited from their
headlines (while I argue it is they who have benefited from Google’s
links). So the Press Association, the Associated Press, Canadian Press,
and Agence France-Presse just forced the search engine to license their
content. Now, rather than linking to the wire services’ clients for
their articles, Google News is displaying the agency reports in full on
its site.

My new ipod touch…

My boyfriend and me just placed an order on two new ipod touchs. In our local Humac shop we are now number 14 and 15 on the waiting list. I still have some concerns, but after hearing that it probably will be open for third party software development  I realised that my concerns mainly were located in software – not in the hardware, so one way or the other it will fullfill my wildest gadget dreams.

I will write a full detailed review here as soon as it arrives