He talks about a few experiences that may be artificial but make millions anyway.

• Understand how to choose high-value, high-impact Web development projects
• Evaluate Web investments in the context of the larger corporate budget
• Internally advocate for user experience as a competitive advantage
• Optimize your business processes and organizational structure to better leverage your Web site

“Over the last few years, ROI has been sought as the “holy grail” of getting more headcount and credibility for Web design teams. By unraveling how to measure the value of Web design, ROI analysis contextualizes corporate decision-making and transforms user experience design into a real competitive advantage.”

Then, at the 2008 Serious Play conference, IDEO’s Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play. He reminds us to “forget the adult behaviours that get in the way of ideas.” A great video to change the way you get to ideas.

• Explorations: Go for quantity
• Building: Think with your hands
• Role Play: Act it out

Each participant was asked to identify a key barrier that prevents organizations from being adaptable, innovative, or an inspiring place to work; and then to propose a potential solution. In the video clips, academics, venture capitalists, and CEOs identified the critical flaws of "management-as-usual" and posit innovative solutions.

Already an industry standard, Shazam fully integrates with and complements the iPhone’s native environment, allowing you to seamlessly discover, buy and share tunes simply by holding your iPhone to music for just a few seconds.

The Shazam application enables you to tap into a vast database of nearly 5 million tracks giving instant satisfaction for those times when you want to know the tune that is playing, learn more about the artist, buy the song immediately - or simply add it to your playlist.

You can:

• Tag music: identify music anywhere - whether it’s on the radio, TV, in a movie or in a store.
• Build your own soundtrack: see the list grow every time music is tagged.
• Get the music: go straight to iTunes to preview and buy.
• Music Videos: see related videos of the track on YouTube.
• Capture the moment: personalise the tag by taking a photo and adding it to ‘My Tags’.
• Share the moment: send track details to friends via email.

As David Armano pointed out: “The biggest challenge that today’s marketers face is understanding how to overcome the obstacles that get in the way from creating user/customer/consumer experiences that people want to make part of their everyday lives.”

I also wanted to share this slidecast, The long wow. This presentation lays out an experience-centric approach to fostering and creating loyalty by systematically impressing your customers again and again. The Long Wow challenges creators of customer experiences to plan across channels, time, and disciplines to identify a progression of seduceable moments.

For more on that topic, you can check Adaptive Path’s blog.

We all speak about UGC, social network, sharing and so forth but what do we do ourselves?  We work with the Internet everyday and are immersed in a world of widely distributed knowledge and don’t use much of these advantages.

We don’t spend much time innovating but have a lot of clients. We cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license processes or inventions from other companies [that spend a lot of time experimenting but don’t have enough clients to take these innovations to market].

In Think Like a Venture Capitalist and Change the Marketing Model, Mark Kvamme said: “When it comes to the ways technology is changing the world, marketers would do well to think like venture capitalists: invest upfront in opportunities with potentially huge payouts and help new technology companies define novel ad models.”

I also wanted to share this presentation from Nokia about open innovation. I hope the case studies will get you excited about trying to open the way you work a little bit.

For more reading you can check:

• How Nokia Users Drive Innovation
• Innovation through Global Collaboration

If agencies are going to design experiences, then it might be the time for us to have a closer look at design thinking.

Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, recently wrote an interesting piece on Harvard business review on how thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes—and even strategy.

Here are key points on how to make design thinking part of the innovation drill.

• Begin at the beginning
• Take a human-centered approach
• Try early and often
• Seek outside help
• Blend big and small projects
• Budget to the pace of innovation
• Find talent any way you can
• Design for the cycle

Then you might be interested in seeing this video conference on the same topic that Tim Brown gave at MIT about innovation through design thinking.