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Recently, Robin Bew, Chief Economist in the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research division of The Economist magazine, posted the results of an EIU survey of large businesses.

With such a complex system as the world economy, I always have my doubts as to how useful research like this is, but an interesting statistic called out was:

Companies today earn a third of their revenues from overseas. In two years time that figure will have grown to 60%.

This information impacts the way I’m currently advising clients in at least two ways:

• If digital media is the primary marketing/communication vehicle world wide, and 33-60% of your revenue is likely to come from sources other than your own country, and therefore that media is likely to be consumed (in the case of US-based companies) in some other language than English… do you have a strategy to support multi-lingual content? At all? Without excessive costs and time delays for translation and localization? If not, what revenue, cost, and competitive opportunities are you missing?
  • Due to crowdsourcing techniques, and better, faster, cheaper and more directly integrated translation technology/workflow, it has never been easier to address this opportunity – but it does require the existing technical infrastructure and business-savvy to put together an intelligent content pipeline. If you have not looked into this in the last few years, you will be astonished by what is possible and at what price tag.
• Consumer and business behavior is not the same, worldwide. With an innovation hat on, do you really understand the needs of your ultimate customers, wherever they may live? Are your “innovations” user and need focused? (rather than product/company-focused, or “purely” demographics-focused)
  • Adoption of mobile technology, for example, and “smartphones” specifically, tends to lead in the United States, even though the cellular networks of the US lag behind other countries that have significantly greater (and cheaper) internet speeds. (This according to contacts I have in telecom – non-publishable/citeable stats).
  • Serving mobile customers (or employees, partners, suppliers) is still a dramatically underserved area – whether a smartphone or a “dumb” phone. There are many opportunities to think out of the retail store “box” (quite literally the “big box” stores), and traditional non-interactive media. Customer engagement, service, satisfaction, price-checking, order checking, etc., is still quite disconnected from the online vs. offline experience – even 15 years after the rise of the web. There is a real opportunity to leap beyond ignorance of the full power of the web on the desktop, and straight into the much faster growing world of mobile content and applications.

Have you looked far enough to see and act on these opportunities?

Whether you believe the rest of the macroeconomic and microeconomic predictions/analysis of The Economist or any other source – I don’t see any easy way to ignore the two above trends. Almost every inquiry which has come in to us in the last few months has been explicitly focused on these two areas – and the convergence/integration of these trends into the siloed infrastructure that most organizations have in place.

Converging and integrating to set the stage for rapid growth opportunities seems to finally be a consensus opportunity to power out of the economic troubles of the last 1-2 years (depending on industry and location). Both the cutting edge adopters and the laggards are running as fast as they can to take advantage of these opportunities… is your organization?

No Strategy = Less (No?) Opportunity

Are you ready? What have you done to prepare? Seen compelling reasons *not* to look at multi-lingual or mobile implications for your organization?

Carlos has worked at Cisco for 17 years in a variety of roles, and advocates for the broad and creative use of technologies that are transforming how companies do business, creating distinct competitive advantages and new business models for those who adopt them.

Dominguez says that video, Web 2.0 applications and the increasing use of social networks, at home and at work, are at the heart of the collaboration revolution that is helping companies use the power of collective intelligence to produce revolutionary ideas for new products, better customer service and greater cost reductions.

For those who attended the Front End of Innovation (FEI) Boston show in May this year, you might recognize that is directly an area that I was covering in my presentation “Do you have the strength for Innovation in a 2.0 World?” (details and bonus content available)

It was a sincere pleasure of speaking at length with Carlos, and for my part, I believe we had a stunning array of innovation and collaboration-related tangents that emerged, which I believe are well worth paying attention to. Not your average interview, by any stretch.

A sampling of the highlights until we have a transcription ready:

Social networking and open innovation:
How did Journey find the next replacement singer after languishing for years with the missing voice of Steve Perry (lead singer) in the late 80s? YouTube and social networking located a replacement singer from… well, you’ll have to listen to find out.

Virtual meetings and worlds:
Cisco is not immune from the worldwide dip in the economy, has taken steps to ban all large scale travel for their sales meetings, executive meetings – at a 10x cost reduction (minimally), and with no perceived decrease in the richness or validity of the outcomes. What is the role of telepresence? Gaming as a competitive driver for salespeople? Take a listen.

Culture:
To paraphrase Carlos:

Most great innovations are killed within organizations… as they are threats to the existing business… and the Cisco culture is specifically built and tested to prevent potential ideas from being killed

Cisco has a requirement for executives and managers each quarter, or at the least, yearly, to indicate exactly what they are doing within their business unit to Innovate (BIG I in my vernacular or “disruptive innovation” to some) versus innovate (small i or improvememt) within their areas. How does this compare with YOUR organization?

Healthcare:
What is Cisco doing themselves, internally, to innovate in the health and wellness of it’s own employees as well as their families? and what has the impact of that investment been?

And much, much more in this slightly more than 30 minute interview…

We had some issues with Skype introducing noise into the system, but keep your ears open for some fantastic points on the state of Innovation within Cisco, Cisco’s customers, and what Carlos’ experiences in seeing and working with some of the most cutting-edge technologies available, make possible.

Any and all feedback welcomed – and if you have an innovation story that needs to be shared, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, either by commenting, or contacting me directly – dk[at]informationArchitected[dot]com or 617-933-9655.

Carlos can be found on Twitter as @carlosdominguez , and as always, I’m @dankeldsen.

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617-933-9655 to discuss how you can reap the benefits of an architecture and design approach that will enable you to maximize the value of your workforce, regardless of where they might be without pursuing a painful and expensive re-architecting of your systems.

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• Information Architected for Collaboration
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