About this Author
Gwen Smith Ishmael, Sr. Vice President of Insights and Innovation at Decision Analyst in Arlington, TX, has led marketing and new product development activities in the CPG and technology industries since 1986. She also conceived and developed ground-breaking Web-based promotional vehicles, two of which are patent pending. Gwen holds an MBA in Marketing and is a featured speaker on insights and innovation around the world. Her writings have been featured in international text books, most recently in Managing 4 Ps of Marketing FMCG Sector, and Product Innovation: A Strategic Tool for Growth, by ICFAI Publications, 2006 and 2007, respectively.
Founding Author
Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is Director of Innovation Services at Decision Analyst in Arlington, Texas, is a former journalist who worked as an editor and reporter for The Dallas Morning News and the Nashville Tennessean, and was managing editor of D, the Dallas city magazine. She has a master's degree in rhetoric and has also taught college-level English and informal logic.
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December 15, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
You may have noticed the "True Voice" ad off to the upper right.....if you click through you will find that True Voice is a daylong seminar on the business of blogging that Corante is putting on in several cities next year.
Stowe Boyd over at the Get Real blog is one of the organizers of True Voice, and he's just started a blog where bloggers and blog readers can go to post comments on what he and his fellow True Voice organizers have identified as 20 questions that are at the core of blogging.
I mention this all because you, too, can read the questions and make comments. Those of you -- and I know you are out there! -- who consider blogging at its core to be a form of collaborative creativity might be particularly interested in weighing in on the questions.
In order to participate, first go the post on Get Real and then click through to the 20 questions blog.
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| Category: Blogging & Innovation/Creativity
February 11, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
I have been remiss in pointing out that IdeaFlow contributor Joyce Wycoff has herself started not one, but TWO blogs -- Heads-Up! On Organizational Innovation! and Good Morning Thinkers. Joyce has been sending these out as email newsletters for some time (you can still sign up for that version at her Innovation Network site), but it's better to look at the blog versions, because there you can see the comments other people are making on the entries.
I want to point particularly to her Heads-Up entry on Gaining Customer Insights The Creative Way because there've been a lot of posts here about tapping consumer creativity and involving customers in the new product development process. Joyce writes about Staples' Invention Quest as a creative way to find out what customers want.
In The Innovators' Solution, Clayton Christensen says the point is not to find out what customers want, but to find out what jobs customers are trying to get done. Then figure out ways to help the customers get those jobs done. That could apply beyond new products, obviously -- focusing on "jobs" is a creative and efficient way to figure out how to streamline any process in which a company interfaces with its customers.
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| Category: Blogging & Innovation/Creativity | Customer Viewpoint
October 1, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
The theme of Convergence may have been innovation, but that’s not to say that everyone there was up on the latest innovations. Not only had many people I spoke to not heard of IdeaFlow, most had never heard of blogging, either!
But there was at least one other blogger there besides me and Joyce – Tom Asacker, author of The Four Sides of Sandbox Wisdom: Building Relationships In An Age of Chaos, Complexity, and Change, who was the Monday lunch keynote speaker. Tom’s blogged Convergence impressions, including photos (none of me!), are here.
“Innovation is how well you flow around the obstacles,” Tom told us, which reminded me of something I heard folksinger Chuck Pyle (best-known as the writer of “Jaded Lover”) say in a recent concert: “Life is short, but wide.”
UPDATE: I just found out that Imaginatik, featured in my first Convergence installment, has a blog too. Anybody else who was at Convergence have one? Let me know!
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| Category: Blogging & Innovation/Creativity | Collaborative Creativity | Conferences | IdeaFlow
September 9, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
...from Dina Mehta, who's considering doing something similar in researching youth in India: "Leading edge innovation circles, youth speak panels, youth tribe and community panels, youth encounters - blog panel where marketers can interact on a subject with his audience ...... many many 'blog panel' opportunities come to mind ...."
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| Category: Blogging & Innovation/Creativity
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Fast Company magazine has a new groupblog that its writers and editors contribute to, and like the magazine itself, creativity and innovation are hot topics. They've already quoted IdeaFlow, if you need further proof that they're smart people ....check it out. Here's a roundup of their recent blogposts on creativity and innovation.
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| Category: Blogging & Innovation/Creativity
September 8, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Stuart Henshall responded to my post about using consumers for innovation by asking if any marketers are out there using blogs as part of diaries for consumer research: "What captures the imagination -- is the idea of giving product managers a 24/7 focus group on steroids."
An interesting idea, so I'm passing it along. Anybody doing this? I have considered the idea of setting up a blog interface for our panel. The care and feeding of a panel, especially an innovation panel like ours where we've actually evaluated and screened the members for creative skills and give them ongoing creativity training, is very time-consuming and expensive. Blogging, RSS, wikis, and other kinds of social software could be a great help.
What Stuart's postulating would be pretty cutting-edge, kind of like a cross between self-reported diaries and ethnographic research. What you'd get from the panelists would blur the line between research and ideation, but imagine the potential for inventive recombinations - both on the part of the panelists and on the part of the marketer analyzing the ongoing results.
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| Category: Blogging & Innovation/Creativity
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