Stop Redesigning Websites – Redesign Your World
Did you know that far more people have cell phones than adequate toilets? If Skype can make phone calling nearly free, can similar innovative approaches help on the world’s toughest health problems?
Naturally, this will take engineering and design innovation. But making a sustainable solution is inherently a business challenge as well. This is a conversation that absolutely needs pragmatic, forward-looking marketers. And I am glad to be borrowing some of the most innovative marketing minds on the Online Marketing Summit’s 2011 tour.
Today I’m kicking off a series of marketing workshops in New York, Atlanta, and Boston on how marketers can take the lead in creating innovative business models. After learning how to consolidate their vision into a single-page map, we’ll challenge ourselves to apply these techniques to improving sanitation for people with the least purchasing power in the world.
Here’s the rough flow of the workshop:
- Introduction: The Nine Factors Rubric. Learn to make single-page business maps and use them to analyze and renovate existing businesses approaches, or show how new approaches will bypass competitors.
- Practice: Business innovation patterns. Teams apply the rubric to explain how real businesses are leading their markets by adopting bold new business models.
- Application: The World Health challenge. Teams generate new revenue models to extend already developed solutions to the new markets that need them most.
The chart below is from an IBM study titled “CEOs are expanding the innovation horizon: important implications for CIOs.” Along with CIOs, this is a defining moment for marketers who embrace digital to make its tools drive profitability and growth company-wide. Adopting new models designs is an increasingly important way for firms to lead their industries.
Why All This Talk about Toilets?
Conferences like the Online Marketing Summit are teeming with creative energy. We need a neutral business on which we can focus as equals. And it has been said that the best way to learn something is to immediately use it to help someone else.
This particular example encourages a kind of ambition and “thinking big” that can carry over to working on important issues in our own firms. And it reminds us we can test solutions for even the largest problems, and that solutions can come from anywhere.
The future of digital experiences will be built by strategists who grasp the full array of emerging business, social, and technical models. Specialties in user experience, branding, application design, and data science are laying the foundation for richer user experiences and business models breakthrough products and revenue based marketing.
1 Response to "Stop Redesigning Websites – Redesign Your World"
July 11, 2011
You raise a serious point (bravo!), but I just have to make light of your example for just a moment.
If most of those 3rd world cell phones are smart phones, then something like (for the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” enthusiast*) George Constanza’s i-Tiolet app may actually prove to be an important big issue solution to increasing accessibility to more sanitary conditions, the world over. Maybe Larry David’s idea is worth promoting… app developers take heed!
*reference: see last season’s finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm