Saturday
Aug112007
Innovation Mashup - Culture + Cool + You
Saturday, August 11, 2007 at 9:57AM Guest blogger, Kalen Jericho
True innovators know how to build a business around culture. In other words they know how to make money off of developing, defining or displacing a lifestyle so much, that it becomes a cultural phenomena.
A perfect example is what happens when a musical style catches a wave, like the annual California desert music festival Coachella. Annually, more than 100,000 hip-hop heads, skaters, artists and supposed slackers converge on Indio, California not for chart topping artists like Beyonce or Fall Out Boy - but for little known musical innovators like Los Angeles based rapper Bus Driver or English singer Lily Allen.
The environmentally-conscious promoters give free tickets to carpoolers, allow people to charge their cell-phones by riding stationary power-generating exercise bikes, and sell ecologically sound bamboo t-shirts. It's the perfect place to meld disparate musical tastes with a low-environmental impact lifestyle. When any one of these elements hits the mainstream it will bring the other socio-cultural elements along - with some opportunities for profit - or savings, whichever way you want to think about it.
Innovation is really about cross-pollinating, about connecting seemingly unrelated groups based on what they have in common and putting a little of each into the other. In the case of the previous example, what do urban youth have in common with the supposed slackers and the frustrations of suburbanites; a profitable frustration with authority.
How do you profit off of small subcultures concerned with individuality, savings and restraint, with minimizing excess? . . . It's about finding your particular breaking point and knowing that everyone else has one too. Are you ready to profit from your frustration? . . . Frustrated with politics add music and a little sex appeal and you've got YouTube's "Obama Girl" video. Feel as though your talent is ignored, merge the existing iTunes/iPod culture with undiscovered singers and musicians and you could fulfill the UNCONFIRMED rumors of a future iRecord company by Apple.
Are you innovative? Are you cool? Well if you answer yes to either of these questions then the elements are there if you're creative enough to build a business around culture.
The environmentally-conscious promoters give free tickets to carpoolers, allow people to charge their cell-phones by riding stationary power-generating exercise bikes, and sell ecologically sound bamboo t-shirts. It's the perfect place to meld disparate musical tastes with a low-environmental impact lifestyle. When any one of these elements hits the mainstream it will bring the other socio-cultural elements along - with some opportunities for profit - or savings, whichever way you want to think about it.
Innovation is really about cross-pollinating, about connecting seemingly unrelated groups based on what they have in common and putting a little of each into the other. In the case of the previous example, what do urban youth have in common with the supposed slackers and the frustrations of suburbanites; a profitable frustration with authority.
How do you profit off of small subcultures concerned with individuality, savings and restraint, with minimizing excess? . . . It's about finding your particular breaking point and knowing that everyone else has one too. Are you ready to profit from your frustration? . . . Frustrated with politics add music and a little sex appeal and you've got YouTube's "Obama Girl" video. Feel as though your talent is ignored, merge the existing iTunes/iPod culture with undiscovered singers and musicians and you could fulfill the UNCONFIRMED rumors of a future iRecord company by Apple.
Are you innovative? Are you cool? Well if you answer yes to either of these questions then the elements are there if you're creative enough to build a business around culture.
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