Load Bearing Creative

From almost the moment that the commercialized Internet had its lights switched on, businesses everywhere have been working to find new ways to use instant global communications to find, store and leverage organizational knowledge.

It’s a tough problem, far tougher than a lot of people think. Innovation happens when the spark of inspiration lands on the deep tinderbox of experience, and in order to make that innovation a fairly predictable (and therefore profitable) process, businesses need a way to turn that experience into usable knowledge. And so, countless document repository systems have been designed and deployed. Endless research has been done on how companies learn and remember on an organizational level. And increasingly, those tasked with tackling the tough problem of knowledge are being driven to a single very lucid conclusion.

The problem isn’t what we don’t know. That’s easy to fix.

The problem is what we don’t know that we know.
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The last fifteen years or so have brought increasing interest in avoiding the evils of direct competition, and the runaway price wars that usually accompany it.  As the global economy shifts, buckles and rocks with changing demand pressures, no one can afford to race to the bottom anymore.

Different business analysts have approached the problem from different directions.   Kim and Mauborgne’s book Blue Ocean Strategy went after the challenge from a technical market analysis perspective, demonstrating a system for breaking down fundamental market drivers and using them to identify undiscovered customer demands.  Other experts went after the problem from a design angle – for lack of a better name, the Apple Path – and argue that the best way to break free of market pressure is simply to make great products and let the market sort itself out.  Still others, pointing to the growing advent of service-oriented companies, talk up relational “integrity selling” as the best way to keep the inside track in difficult sales environments.

They all have their valid points, but no one strategy has ever seemed to provide the end-all, be-all answer to the big question: how do you achieve high competitiveness in a market dominated by other players?
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By most accounts, the “killer app” was born in 1979. Two software engineers, inspired by a classroom session one of them had attended at Harvard Business School, began assembling a small computer program that could visually represent a large number of interdependent calculations in a simple set of tables and columns. That program, which they called Visicalc, was the first electronic spreadsheet.

Visicalc did more than offer consumers an easier method to do their taxes at home. It gave them a reason to invest in the purchase of a home computer. When Visicalc landed, it put the recently released Apple II on the map in a way that few products had done before or accomplished since. Only when commercialized email arrived in the 1990s did a single application inspire more people to buy a computer.

Tech marketers still point to Visicalc as the gold standard for killer apps. A killer app is the Model T. The incandescent light bulb. The atomic bomb. It’s the single innovation that powerfully opens the floodgates for entire industries and ways of life. And today, it’s still the Holy Grail for many people.

But the age of the killer app is fading away. And if you’re busy trying to figure out how to market for the next wave of innovation, you need a different way of thinking about technology marketing.
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