The US doctor gets paid among the most. Even US nurses.

Magna Media forecasts are out for US Ad spend. 2 great graphics are:

“The gulf between invention and innovation is often a huge one that
many entrepreneurs can’t cross,” said Scott D. Anthony, president of
Innosight, a consulting firm.

Take the example of the 4 years it has taken GreenPrint to go from product to market. Amazing story of patience, persistence, and perseverance.

Innovation is far more about prospecting, mining, refining and adding value than it is about pure invention.

Organizational storytelling is slowly but surely becoming a hot
strategy for conveying important information about any business, both
internally and externally.

“Charts leave listeners bemused. Prose remains unread. Dialogue is just
too laborious and slow. Time after time, when faced with the task of
persuading a group of managers or front-line staff in a large
organization to get enthusiastic about a major change, storytelling is
the only thing that works.”

Here is an awesome example of how Costco does it.

A 30% drop for Dell, 17% for HP but 7-8% drop for Acer during the last few quarters shows how Acer is taking marketshare away from DELL in the recent past. Amazingly they are only focused on one of the many markets – Notebooks and Netbooks.

Shows how transitions in product cycles can create opportunities for new entrants.

The WSJ reports:

When companies try to come up with new ideas, they too often look only where they always look. That won’t get them anywhere.

The ideas are typically at the edge of a company’s radar screen, and
sometimes a bit beyond: trends in peripheral industries, unserved needs
in foreign markets, activities that aren’t part of the company’s core
business. To be truly innovative, companies sometimes have to change
their frames of reference, extend their search space. New ways of
thinking and organization can be required as well.

InnoCentive.com

is a site where people and companies look for help in solving
scientific and business challenges. Posters of challenges sometimes
offer cash rewards for solutions: Amounts have ranged from $5,000 to $1
million. The site began as an in-house tool for research scientists at Eli Lilly & Co. to help one another. Now it is independent, with Indianapolis-based Lilly as a founding shareholder.

Sometimes innovations arise when different departments talk to each other. But what’s the best way to start the conversation?

Many companies set up so-called communities of practice, which are
typically internal Web sites where employees are encouraged to share
knowledge and skills important to the company.

Nielsen released the “How teens use media” report.

Its a fascinating read overall.

1. They are more focused – they view one media type at a time.
2. They have better recall – they tend to remember ads and consider ads as content (if good)
3. They read newspapers – really? No really!
4. Television is still the most dominant form of media for teenagers.
5. The most popular genres for U.S. teens are Evening Animation, Participation/ Variety and General Drama.
6. In South Africa, teens averaged more than five hours per day of TV viewing. In Taiwan, teens averaged just two hours and 47 minutes.
7. Beyond the first (TV) and second screens (Computer/Internet) , teens are increasingly watching video on their phones.
8. Teens browse less than half as much as the typical user
9. Sixty-seven percent of teen social networkers say they update their page at least once a week
10. More than half of all U.S. teen mobile  subscribers (66%) say they actually prefer text-messaging to calling. Thirty-four percent say it’s the reason they got their phone.

I was at the Buzz140 conference yesterday, in Chennai, organized by the effervescent Kiruba Shankar, Photon (Vasanth and others) and the knowledge conference. It was a one day Twitter conference attended by about 150 folks, many of whom were learning about twitter for the first time.

It was actually a trending topic on twitter for a brief few minutes. (Photos on Flickr) and some by tag.

There was event coverage in the local media – both the Hindu and Deccan Chronicle covered it briefly today.

There was a very interesting topic on Real time search and its implications on Twitter and Google. Many new players have emerged in the space like Topsy, almost.at and Scoopler.

Photo thanks to Keval Prabhu.

From McKinsey quarterly:

Scientists, sometimes in cooperation with economists, are taking the
lead in a young field that applies complexity theory to economic
research, rejecting the traditional view of the economy as a fully
transparent, rational system striving toward equilibrium.

Many other scientists in the field of complexity theory argue that
earthquakes, forest fires, power blackouts, and the like are extremely
difficult or even impossible to foresee because they are the products
of many interdependent “agents” and cascades of events in inherently
unstable systems that generate large variations.

See the image below for the eerie correlation between banking crisis and earthquakes in So. Cal.

These examples indicate that power law patterns, with their small,
frequent outcomes mixed with rare, hard-to-predict extreme ones, exist
in many aspects of the economy. This suggests that the economy, like
other complex systems characterized by power law behavior, is
inherently unstable and prone to occasional huge failures.

Sarah Blue has some recommendations on the 5 steps to be a better community manager:

It not an earth shattering revelation but a tried and tested set of known best practices.