We’ve always had a soft-spot for Yahoo!. It was one of the first brands on the block that made the tangled-up world wide web a bit more user-friendly. It was our first email address, or at least one of the few email addresses that is still around today (anyone still have a Lycos account?). And of course they had one of the iconic dot-com ad campaigns, and one of the very few that survived the bursting Internet bubble. After each bizarre yet poignant commercial you were asked “do you Yahoo!?” and despite the confusing punctuation we enthusiastically replied “Yes!”

See one of our favorites here:
Do You Yahoo!?

But years of missteps for Yahoo! have led them astray and highlighted their internal identity crisis. Rather than “do you Yahoo!?”, these days it’s more like, “who are you Yahoo!?” For regular users of Yahoo! you’ve probably noticed a new feature called “status-casting.” Essentially it gives users the opportunity to say what they’re doing. It probably sounds familiar because it is years overdue…and remember, this is the Internet we’re talking about, where years can often equate the lifecycle of a company, a service, or trend. This follows Google Mail which has allowed users to set their own statuses, Facebook which does the same, and Twitter which basically only does this. The real kick in the gut is that AOL added this feature a month before Yahoo!. In the pecking order of Internet properties nobody wants to be following AOL.

We applaud the attempt to differentiate by creating a unique name – “status-casting.” But if you’re offering a new take on the name, how about a new take on the activity. For example, surely not all updates are created equal and a creative approach could take advantage of this. From our experience there’s a wide range of updates…some are rants, some are questions, some are jokes, some are urgent, and some certainly are not. What if there was a way to differentiate these updates so they can be categorized or get different placement on a user’s news feed? There’s no shortage of innovation possibilities…if only Yahoo! had taken the time to develop one instead of giving the world one loud, unfortunate status update “Do you still need Yahoo!?”

While this blog focuses on innovation, change, and growth across industries, we can’t help but notice every post takes us back to the middle ages of the Internet, when people were anonymous and email was the most advanced form of communication.  This blog was formed to foster discussion and share relevant news and opinions. At first we were delighted with the responses, like this one:

But then we caught on…some of our more dedicated readers appear to be interested only in peddling generic prescription drugs.  Luckily we get to approve, or in most cases disapprove, comments before they show up here but the sheer volume in recent weeks has made us sit back and wonder…is this form of marketing even slightly effective?  Does anyone click through?  And who is funding these incessant posters?

If this blog gets that much attention, the one or two (million) slightly larger blogs must be inundated.  Someone’s job must be simply to click “delete” on all the comments.  We’ve included screenshots of our favorites.  Just as we hope we’re successful in helping people come up with new ideas, at least they’ve succeeded in giving us a laugh.

We don't know what these comments mean but we love them!

For decades, “innovation” has been touted as the savior of nearly every industry, even if many businesses may not really know exactly what anybody meant by that. It’s a nebulous notion…change requires confidence that where you end up is better than where you are now…but it’s also an inevitable one. There’s barely an industry around that wasn’t altered from the inside out by the Internet in the last decade, and again by the financial collapse in the last year or two.

So when we heard about McKinsey going through the entire portfolio of titles at Condé Nast we were impressed that the media giant was taking proactive steps to get a little leaner and ultimately save themselves from the fate of so many other magazines that have folded in the last few years. Afterall, even during the boom years, we question some of their bloated expense account choices. Imagine they’d been a little more frugal all this time? They probably wouldn’t need McKinsey to come in at all.

But rather than sound like a prudish grandmother, we applaud the choice, which according to an internal memo serves to help them “rethink” how to do business. What a smart choice. What a bold move. What a way to save yourself from the fire…

Hold on…except for one thing, the New Yorker isn’t being included in the makeover. The Observer reports not only David Remnick but the entire editorial staff will be excused from participating. This comes as a shock to us because by not participating, the New Yorker is missing out on a huge opportunity to change and grow. Perhaps Condé Nast thinks the magazine is perfect the way it is. But will it always be so perfect? Perhaps McKinsey is just in there to chop budgets and heads. But won’t there be opportunities to truly rethink business? When starting projects like this there’s always a period of discovery and who knows what might be found out about the New Yorker? The answer to that for now is, nobody.

While it may be painful, the other titles at Condé Nast have the chance to come out of the process as svelte, put-together models of media…the “after” picture that so many of the titles feature in their books. And by not participating, the New Yorker is confined to resembling the “before” picture, a little schlumpy, a little off, and if it just made a few changes it would be a star. So consider this an open call to action. If they aren’t going to bring in McKinsey for the New Yorker, then the people at the New Yorker should take a look at their operations on their own and try to evolve. Sure, running a thought-leading magazine like the New Yorker while always having an eye on the bottom line might be a scary prospect, but running a magazine without even being willing to have a conversation about change and innovation sounds a whole lot scarier.

This week we were surprised to hear the potential asking price for BusinessWeek: $1.00. At that price you could find it somewhere on the value menu of most fast food restaurants. In some ways this feels worse than just shuttering what was once the largest ad supported title in the country…it’s more like a slap in the face than a fond farewell.

BusinessWeek is faulted for coming out with a weekly by one source that says “They can’t compete as a weekly anymore because financial information is so time sensitive.” But we think this might have been said by someone who’s never read an issue of BusinessWeek. Ok, ok, neither have we. But we regularly go to the site for a wealth of information, and well, it’s certainly worth a dollar, particularly the Innovation section. Check it out while you still can for insights on how businesses and brands are growing and changing, as well as basics and updates on investing, starting a company, and real time updates of stock performances.

BusinessWeek isn’t going out of business yet, but it’s unclear what the future holds for the brand. With the shuttering of titles likely to continue, is there anything we can do? Audiences are shifting habits and getting their messages online. But does this shift in habits mean they have to kill the messenger? Right now people don’t seem to mind, but eventually when all the messengers are dead, what happens to the message?

So we’ll say it, in 30 years, there will be no newspapers or magazines, probably sooner. But people will still want content. Lest it become a tale of newstander beware, it’s time to proactively figure out how to protect these brands. It’s not that the content is irrelevant, just that the medium may be. In other words, people don’t buy magazines because they want paper, they buy them because they want content. The source still matters though and we’re wagering that people would trust information from BusinessWeek over JoeQBlog.

We’d love to see BusinessWeek tap into its brand strength and find a way through this. Perhaps there’s an issue with the name…is “Business” too vague? Is “Week” too long? Maybe they need to develop subbrands that can speak to everything they offer. Afterall, who would expect such a great Innovation section based on the name BusinessWeek? We know that people won’t be holding paper-based magazines soon and we also know that people will always want content they can trust. With that in mind, let’s hope BusinessWeek takes some insights from its own innovation section and finds a way to stick around a while longer.

A recent issue of Wired magazine (a favorite at the I Open Lab) was dedicated to the New New Economy and on the cover they spell out the laws for success in this “New Squared” economy, including more start ups, fewer giants, and infinite opportunity.  While this is certainly on trend with popular thinking, and nicely plugs the Editor-in-Chief’s book (The Long Tail by Chris Anderson), it ironically takes a narrow view of the industry it uses as a key example, the American auto industry.

The fall from grace of the big three auto makers is a shot in the gut for the American economy and has led to pontifications about the poor decisions made for decades and the dangers of becoming to big for your own good.  While dismantling the big three’s performance issues, the article makes several references to the growing dominance of Japanese rivals, timing issues like introducing hybrids priced $10,000 to $20,000 more than the competition, and a pervasive NIH (Not Invented Here) mentality.  These are all good points, but they don’t stem from the big three just being, well, too big.

Surely being successful can’t be the cause of ultimately being unsuccessful.  Wired calls large companies like Wal-Mart, AT&T, and the big three “dinosaurs,” who are finally marching into the tar pits.  The issue with these companies isn’t size though.  Afterall, a lot of small dinosaurs went extinct too.  The issue is a mindset that resulted in a corporate trouncing by smarter, braver, and yes, even bigger competitors.  While praising the performance of Toyota and Honda, Wired fails to acknowledge that these companies are HUGE themselves.  If being so big is the cause of failure and the age of giants is over, why are Toyota and Honda doing so well?  For that matter, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others?  Sure, we’re all in a larger playing field with more players, but the biggest players are still winning.

An opportunity that automakers in the US missed is tapping into their own long tail, to borrow the term from Wired.  With being a large company comes having large workforces and the bigger the workforce, the better the brain power.  A firm with 3000 employees can almost always come up with bigger and better ideas than a firm with 3 employees.  In this age of open sourcing and a belief in the power of crowds, it would behoove the big three, and any other “dinosaur,” to tap into their own long tail to develop new products, ways of doing business, and making breakthroughs happen.

While unfortunately a lot of these big companies made decisions that ultimately led to their demise, we’re sticking with the theory that when it comes to business, bigger is better.

It worked for other brands ‘gone wild’, so we at the I Open Lab want to encourage you to make your ideas go wild! While we do mean take the tops off the ideas, ahem…it’s only in the PG meaning of the term.

Recently we introduced a key idea-do: saying no to no. Another one is to go wild with your ideas. As long as we aren’t saying no to no, why don’t we also go a far as possible with our ideas? If you can make your ideas bigger than ever before, even if you come up with impossible ideas, this can help you make breakthroughs happen. It’s much easier to tame a wild idea and use pieces of it than to build up a smaller idea. This can also be used for making a wish list, which we’ve worked on in earlier posts. If you made a list of things you wish you were doing better, what if you bumped up those wishes and made them even bigger? Instead of wanting a promotion to make more money, maybe you really wish you were the boss and that you were opening your own company. Instead of saying you want to get your book published, what if you said you wanted to be the next JK Rowling? And if you’re starting a company and just trying to get by, what if you said you wanted to build a global brand and be number one?

Just as a lot of us might not have been taught the tools for brainstorming, some of us might also have trouble saying what we really want. Perhaps it sounds too arrogant, or perhaps you might be afraid of setting yourself up for failure, but if you look at your wishes and go wild with them, it might help you uncover some insights into what you’re truly trying to accomplish. And after all, until we have the right question in front of us, we’ll be hard-pressed to come up with the right answers.

So keep saying no to no, and go wild! They’re just ideas and there’s not harm in making them as big as possible!

Previously we encouraged you to make wishes.  This could be anything you want to be doing better, more of, or maybe even at all.  For those of you who may be an unsure entrepreneur, this could involve something that you’re afraid of that we wanted you to put into the form of a wish.  Before we tackle these wishes, there’s still some work to do.  

When you’re trying to solve any challenge, it’s important to clearly know what that challenge is.  For example, perhaps you’ve come across situations where you’ve been asked for answers to questions that aren’t clear.  Maybe a boss has asked for something without being clear about what it is, or a coworker needs something from you, but they don’t know what that is themself.  In cases like this, it’s nearly impossible to give the right answers because no one has asked the right questions.  

So before ideating, let’s look at some Idea-Do’s…these are tips to keep in mind whenever you’re making lists. We say making lists because while brainstorming is called many things, what you’re really doing is coming up with great lists.  Once you have a great list, you can make the right choices.  And lists aren’t just for answers, they’re for questions too.  

The first Idea-Do is to “Say No to No.”  Anytime you’re coming up with a list of ideas, whether they’re fears, wishes, questions or answers, you don’t want to say no to anything that comes to mind.  All ideas are valuable, but please don’t confuse that with the polite saying that all ideas are good ideas.  Some ideas are actually quite bad. But all ideas are valuable because even the worst idea in the world might inspire you to think of a really great idea.  Also, if you’re constantly stopping yourself and judging each idea that comes up, you may lose momentum and instead of coming up with dozens of ideas to pick from, you may struggle just to get a handful of ideas down on paper.  So just say no, to no, and with that in mind look at your wishes again and come up with ten more.  It might sound hard, but it’s possible, and you might just be surprised with what you think of next.  

Coming up…more Idea-Do’s.  To discuss any wishes, feel free to leave comments or contact us at paul@iopenlab.com.

As you head into this weekend, whether for some much needed sun and fun, a few more days of rain, or just some “you” time, we wanted to share some news and insights on exciting developments and trends. And in the classical brainstorming tradition of borrowing ideas, instead of coming up with a list of insights, we found a great newsletter did it for us!

Trendwatching.com just released their May 2009 newsletter, reviewing 15 of its top consumer trends and businesses that are tapping into them. Some of the ideas are particularly exciting…like a few that might just breathe life into newspapers and magazines. Mine is a new initiative that allows readers to create a magazine based on content from various publications, including Time, Sports Illustrated, Food & Wine, Real Simple, Money, InStyle, Golf, and Travel + Leisure. The Local is an aggregation of local news that the New York Times is offering for specific neighborhoods and areas. As we become a global community, is the answer for newspapers and magazines to become hyperlocal?

Take a look at all the ideas presented here and maybe there’s a niche with your name on it. We’re particularly excited about Baker Tweet, which allows bakers to use Twitter for alerting tech savvy customers when a fresh batch of warm bread, cookies, and treats are available. Now that’s a tech trend we can sink our teeth into!

So what are you trying to figure out?  Breakthroughs happen every day and sometimes it’s as simple as making a list of ideas, looking at something from a new perspective, or pushing yourself to finally take action.  We’ve all been there and this blog is here to help, engage, and inspire.

The I Open Lab is all about breakthroughs; for companies, entrepreneurs, and anyone in need of ideas.  The IOL blog focuses on everyday breakthroughs, looking at leading innovators, inspirational changes, and tools and techniques that can help push any project, personal or professional, forward.  Stay tuned for some free tips on how to make breakthroughs happen!