Christopher Golda

Umair Haque has posted a paper on Media Innovation in collaboration with Innovaro in which he explores the three forces of successful radical media innovators that are trumping today’s media incumbents.

The reason today’s media incumbents are suffering are threefold. First, a new breed of media revolutionary is building a newer, better media industry, whose economics differ radically from yesterday, and one which requires fundamentally new approaches to strategy and innovation. Second, these revolutionaries are doing so by transforming yesterday’s hapless, powerless, disconnected consumers into connected, empowered, choice-rich, and attention-saturated consumers, whose market power in unison is volatile, explosive, and unpredictable …

The consumer to prosumer language is being noticed by many as a more appropriate way of describing, as Umair puts it, the deceptively simplistic concept of user-generated content. The report examines how markets, networks, and communities are redefining the media industry by promoting a shift from core to edge, to efficiently organize consumption/production and ultimately explode value creation. It’s important for anyone who wants to understand the true value in MySpace, Craigslist, Wikipedia, etc. Read the full paper here.

This is a great piece on innovation (or lack thereof) at Microsoft, and how they’ve managed to become “me too” players in markets. Most notable are zune, soapbox (pretty much all web efforts actually), xbox, etc. Although Google have yet to develop significant revenue stream beyond their search business, at least they’re trying to create value through their 70-20-10 innovation.

Soundtrack: Clipse ft. Pharrell - Mr. Me Too