INNOBLOG

This week the Innovator's Guide to Growth was featured on the Post2Post Virtual Book Tour. Five different bloggers reviewed the book and interviewed the lead authors, Scott Anthony and Mark Johnson. We'd like to thank all the bloggers as well as Paul Williams, the organizer of Post2Post, who blogs at Idea Sandbox.

Here's the wrap-up on who posted what when, with links:

Monday:  Gordon Graham of Broken Bulbs posted an interview with Scott Anthony about the book's potential application in a broad range of circumstances including small business, business schools, and in what industries Scott expects to see disruptive innovation in the future.

Tuesday:  Greg Daines of Ideanomics posted a review of the book and promises to post video of his interview with Mark Johnson soon. Meanwhile, he called Innovator's Guide to Growth "the best business book of 2008."

Wednesday:  Josh Kutticherry of FutureThinkTank posted Part One of an interview Scott Anthony (second part, including an audio interview, coming next Wednesday), in which he asks Scott about ideation and inspiration, and poses the $100 million question: "What would you do with your copmany if someone gave you $100 million to grow it?"

Thursday:  Idris Mouttee of Innovation Playground posted an interview with Scott Anthony about special corporate innovation teams, overshooting, targeting nonconsumers, and innovation metrics.

Friday: Gregg Fraley at Gregg Fraley Creativity & Innovation posted a review calling the book "the new bible for innovation managers and leaders" and praising its "it’s womb-to-tomb" approach to innovation management and process.

And, the book tour lives on past its allotted week, as well — next Wednesday, Oct. 1, Josh Kutticherry will post the second part of his Scott Anthony interview and Doug Stevenson (Fraley's partner in "The Innovise Guys" blog and podcast series) will post a review on The Innovise Guys blog. We'll also be watching for Greg Daines' video of his Mark Johnson interview, and will link to that when it's up.

We were pleased to note that InnoBlog is included in the new Innovation site of the new news-aggregator Alltop, and even more pleased when we learned that getting listed there is often the result of reader requests. Thank you to the people (or person!) who suggested us.

Alltop launched in January, with the stated goal is to "collect stories from 'all the top' sites on the web....At each Alltop site, we display the headlines of the latest stories from dozens of sites and blogs. You can think of an Alltop site as a 'digital magazine rack' of the Internet." In Innosight terms, AllTop is trying to satisfy the customer job "help me find relevant information on the Internet," a job that many sites are trying to satisfy in a variety of ways. It's too early to tell how well Alltop will do, but it's a good sign that the site was launched by Nononina, the company owned by uber-enterpreneur Guy Kawasaki. Nononia's last start-up, Truemors, was just sold a few weeks ago to Vancouver-based "crowd-powered media" platform NowPublic.

Wall Street Journal reporter Wendy Bounds wrote about Alltop here. And just for fun, this link goes to a drawing of how Alltop works compared to how Google works, by Dan Roam, author of Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems with Pictures.

I have to give credit to the folks at advertising agency Modernista! for dismantling the company’s existing website in favor a “site-less” approach. In this disruptive move they’ve done much more than simply save on site design.

By foregoing the breadth of information available on a traditional site, they focus viewer attention on the company’s art and creativity. It’s a big win (and just plain cool).

The company’s new homepage consists only of a small menu that floats over the viewer’s referring site or over the Modernista! entry on Wikipedia. Click on the “Print work” menu tab and you’re directed to the company’s work as presented on Flickr; click on “TV work” and up pops a You Tube page with videos of Modernista!-created ads.

This new approach is different, budget and very simple. To many, it would be a leap down in terms of the traditional metrics that define good website design. The company’s “conventional” website was a resource-intensive, complex site that resembled a kooky (yes, I said it) haunted house. It was impressive yet overwhelming, flexing the firm’s creative muscle with more animation than most viewers could handle. The new site is perhaps less user-friendly for those expecting a traditional website structure, and offers less context for the depicted company work. The new format could also yield negative user-generated critiques of Modernista!’s work on the social media pages that serve as its website.

The trade-off for these drawbacks? A cleaner site that demonstrates the firm’s creativity, confidence in letting its ads speak for themselves and comfort incorporating Web 2.0 platforms in its work. The site has generated more blog traffic and buzz in a wider range of forums than a traditional website with fancier features would have done, with this blog post as a case in point. Isn't that the goal of a website as a marketing tool? And the move isn’t one that other leading advertising agencies are likely motivated to follow. Voila! Disruption.

But that’s just the web site. The real disruption will be if Modernista! applies a similar leap-down approach in developing client advertising campaigns that have worse performance on some traditional dimensions but are, perhaps, simpler and more affordable relative to conventional advertising.