I had this slide in a presentation to a client about six months ago.
They’d asked me to come in and tell them what social media might mean for their business.
I introduced the presentation with some basic creds, how I’ve been doing this ‘digital’ thing since 1995, and how the question has rarely changed since then:
90s – What might the web mean for our business?
00s – What might mobile mean for our business?
2007 – What might digital mean for our business?
2009 – What might social mean for our business?
2010 – What might apps mean for our business?
2011 – What might social mean for our business?
2012 – What might …
and here’s my punt, What might venturing mean for our business?
(Excuse the order and timestamps, its just to illustrate a point).
By venturing, I mean creating new businesses, new products and new services, or investing in the process which allows them to be created.
Rapid product and brand creation. Applying startup and incubator models to agencies, and seeing what happens.
In its poorest form, it looks like agencies setting up hack days and not paying its developers, using the results and saying ‘look what we made’.
Slightly higher (or lower) on the scale is networks pouring cash into incubators like Wayra.
Above that are agency models like PIE and DE-DE, and shifting propositions from companies like R/GA.
And of course, at the very top are businesses like Frog, Ideo, Fluxx and Sidekick.
Venturing is the new new. That comes with bad and good, but will undoubtedly be interesting to see what is created/coerced.
Update: Just stumbled across this link which explains some of the problems with venturing and generally issues with working in startup modes. When campaigns fail, no-one dies. When businesses/products/ventures fail, jobs and people’s careers can be on the line.