All posts by boudewijntilman

Business Case, News

Involvement of fans or consumers

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The involvement of fans of a football club can be enormous. I would like to give you two different examples.

First of all, in 2005 an American business family bought Football Club Manchester United. A lot of the fans of Manchester United did not like this, because they thought, the business men did not love the sport and the club, but only want to make money out of it. In November 2005 those fans started their own Football Club: FC United of Manchester. They play every week a match and around the 11,000 fans support this team nowadays, and to not support Manchester United anymore. As you can see, some consumers/fans used to be very loyal, but such a big change did change their idea about ‘their’ club as well.

Another example of the involvement of a football club and the fans is in Mexico. In Mexico there is a club in the second division where the fans make the squad. They vote before the weekend which players are playing and who it not. In the break the supporters can vote via Twitter, the website and text messages which players should be substituted. And believe it or not, they are doing very well in the league (fourth place). The players are very excited and say that the supporters always support them (because they make the line-up). Of course sometimes players are angry with the supporters because they do not play.

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Business Case, Opinion

LinkedIn

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Hey people,

Last session Dimitris talked about the LinkedIn Alumni network for Consumer Channel Dynamics. I really like LinkedIn. It can be very useful and it is not like Facebook or Twitter. LinkedIn is not only a social network site, it also helps you to create a valuable network. I started to read some things about LinkedIn last year, and figured out that it can be helpful sometimes to deny some people, it is not about how big your network is, but how useful. Sometimes a smaller network can be more useful than very big networks.

I added a small movie about LinkedIn, because I saw some people not raising their hands when Dimitris asked if everybody used LinkedIn. The first time I was a little bit skeptical as well about LinkedIn, but now I think it is very helpful.

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News

The strength of a community

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Communities can be very strong. I add a link (in Dutch though) where you can see the strength of the community even it is not payed by anybody.

www.voetbalnederland.nl

This is a website for Dutch amateur football team. Every club and even every team can register on this site. What are the benefits and fun you can have? It is a website where you can post the score of a match, who played, for what competition you played and who scored the goals. You can even add pictures, stories about a match and everybody can see this.

Some of my friends who I play with in a team do use this. When you ask them why they put time and effort into this, they say it is fun and you can follow your competitors in a funny way as well. And everybody likes it to know how many times they scored in their history.

Companies are apparantly also interested. You see some sponsors who support this site, and ofcourse give discounts to people who visit the site.

I just wanted to show you the strength of a community even though people are competitors of each other, but are willing to help and inform each other.

Greets, Boudewijn

News, Opinion

Most innovative company 2011

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As you can see at the link below, four out of the top 5 of the most innovative companies are internet companies or a company who has to deal with the internet and computers:

1. Apple
2. Twitter
3.  Facebook
4. Nissan
5. Groupon
http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2011/

For me it was obvious that Apple was placed on #1 and Facebook was in the top 5 as well. The most surprising company is Nissan. But after some research I found out that they focus on the new way of dealing with the environment: be as sustainable as possible. They still work with closed innovation, with their own knowledge. The other firms are more open innovators.

My post about the open innovation pitfalls stated that companies move towards open innovation. Obviously not all companies move towards open innovation, even though they want to meet the expectations of the customers.On one hand you can say Nissan is doing very good with their innovation, because they are placed number 4. On the other hand if you look at the sales within the Netherlands in 2011, they can not be found within the top 10 (http://www.autozine.nl/enquete_verkoop.html). So this might rise the question: when you innovate as a firm, is it necessary to listen to your customers? Thus use a way of open innovation?

Articles, News

Pitfalls of crowdcasting

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During the last class (Monday January 16th in the morning class) we discussed about the open innovation after the Lays ‘Maak je Smaak’ case. Open innovation has some pitfalls. In the article below you can read about these pitfalls.

I found this article on a Dutch website, so I translated into English. It is about crowdcasting: “Crowdcasting is a problem-solving and idea-generating tactic in which a corporation disseminates details of a specific problem or situation to a carefully chosen group of people for possible solutions. The process is often conducted as a contest. The results may be used to resolve difficult or complex development and marketing issues.”( http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/definition/crowdcasting)

(Translation of ‘De Valkuilen van Crowdcasting’, http://www.frankwatching.com)

Innovation is for many organisation the keyword of success. The definition is used a lot, but most of the times people do not understand it. Research showed that the biggest successes can be achieved when using open innovation with the help of consumers and other companies. Sometimes it does succeed, sometimes it does not. How is this possible? Below the three most common pitfalls of crowdcasting will be dealt with, crowdcasting is a very popular way of open innovation.

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