Eight years ago, I read a book called Blur that changed the way that I think about ideation, innovation and marketing communications. The book was written by Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer, who espoused the concept known as mass customization in an earlier book, Future Perfect, way back in the mid-80s. In Blur, they introduce a model known as “Seed, Select and Amplify.”
The model espouses that in the age of low cost replication, customization and distribution economies (think: credit card offer letters, Zazzle and The Long Tail), the impetus shifts away from trying to execute to perfection and towards creating and seeding the market with lots of different low-cost offers, known as “Seeds.”
Invariably, very few of these seeds will sprout, which is perfectly Darwinian so unapologetically, you “Select” the winners and cast aside the losers. Then, you “Amplify” the winners within the marketplace (through focused marketing efforts, iteration, etc.)
This got me thinking that the Seed, Select and Amplify model is starting to play out in the online marketplace.
Consider that I have three ventures that I am cultivating right now – Me.com, a Connected Community platform play, vSocial, which provides self-service Internet video services for prosumers, and Insider Engine, which is a stock investing arbitrage.
All three of these are iterated on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. What works and what doesn’t is able to be rapidly deployed, tracked and measured, fine tuned and/or put to sleep if it doesn’t sprout.
This is the agility that Web 2.0 development strategies afford – instantly online, ubiquitous access, simplified development and release cycles, enabling application delivery as a living, breathing service.
Consider that via an online advertising network like Google AdWords and AdSense that I can test different messages, different search keywords, different landing pages, different offers, and amazingly, deploy, customize and track them in near real time for very little money.
Finally, consider Google, the company. Google’s development model is very much akin to Seed, Select and Amplify. New products start out in Google Labs, and the company is clearly planting a lot of seeds. A count of the applications in Labs today shows that there are 19 applications, ranging from Spreadsheets and Notebook to Page Creator and Froogle Mobile. This is out of a total of 49 discrete applications that I count between Google Products and Google Labs.
What is interesting to me is that while the company has generated a number of unqualified hits, like News, Maps, Mobile Maps and Desktop, in addition to eponymous Search, AdWords and AdSense offerings, not all of its seeds sprout.
While Gmail and Talk are definitely credible offerings (I use both), neither is specifically innovative. More to the point, offerings like Video, Blogger, Orkut, Froogle, Blog Search, Pack and Picasa are pretty uninspired (in my opinion).
I would argue that if Google is to realize its full potential and become a company that stands the test of time, it will need to institutionalize a more formal process of selecting the winner seeds and casting aside the loser seeds.
The goodness in such an approach is three-fold. One, a company can’t be all things to all people, and trying to be only casts shadows on the areas where it is truly inspired and excellent.
Two, freeing up resources to focus on amplifying the winner seeds ensures that those seeds become the proverbial kings of the jungle.
Three, by not chasing after every market that has a pulse, the company avoids a Microsoft-style backlash whereby it is seen as a black hole for market competition, which tends to cloud its credo of doing no harm.
Will Google embrace such a discipline? Will they figure out how to reconcile new media with old media? Will they figure out how to cultivate social networks, online communities and other architectures of participation? Or, are they limited to algorithms and automation?
As an active participant in this market, it will be interesting to see how this plays out, and to be clear, it is a major piece on the strategic chess board, but regardless, I plan on doing a lot more seeding, selecting and amplifying, and so should you.
It's a fundamental shift in how an agile company of a few can come up with an idea (normally supplied by a customer), soft-launch it, test it, and amplify or kill it within a matter of weeks or days. Since most startups such as us have limited personnel and financial resources, the ability to identify and focus on the ideas getting traction is a critical success factor. We know we have to keep innovating - and this simple formula allows a company to do so in a confident and controlled manner. I haven't read Blur yet, but I'm going to add it to my list now. Thanks for the post.
Posted by: Steven Cox, Click For Lessons | August 08, 2006 at 10:22 AM
Re: "I would argue that if Google is to realize its full potential and become a company that stands the test of time, it will need to institutionalize a more formal process of selecting the winner seeds and casting aside the loser seeds."
Disagree strongly. Google is putting all of its products into the marketplace, rather than burying them in their Labs. Moreover, you seem to be misinformed as to how Google rolls out services. If Google tests out a new feature, they might do it selectively by serving the modified service to a specific block of IP addresses. There are countless changes to Google Products that have gone unnoticed simply because Google did not make the changes ubiquitous or ballyhoed. Google conducts market feedback in a unique way.
For what it is worth, Orkut is largely the work of one programmer (named Orkut!). If it seems "rather uninspired," it is because the development team is much smaller than GMail's. For GMail and GTalk, Google headhunted as many premeire DHTML gurus as possible.
I think Google has only one real problem looking forward: How many goddamn accounts do they expect me to create? They just released Google Analytics for everyone to use, but you need a separate Analytics account for each AdWords account you own.
If there is one universal truth about users, it is that we all hate remembering five different logons and five different passwords.
Posted by: John "Z-Bo" Zabroski | August 17, 2006 at 09:08 AM
Following up my old thoughts, here is some less hasty information. Here are some people who Google attracted to work for them:
http://massless.org/
http://www.youngpup.net/
http://erik.eae.net/
http://glenmurphy.com/projects/
http://brevity.org/
Posted by: John "Z-Bo" Zabroski | August 26, 2006 at 04:45 PM
How do you view it now in 2009 ?
Karthik Balaguru
Posted by: Karthik Balaguru | June 27, 2009 at 02:20 PM
@Karthik, I think these trend lines have only accelerated, and recently blogged on the construct in a post called, 'Pattern Recogniton: Makers, Marketplaces, and the Library of the Commons.' Here is the URL: http://bit.ly/NJVC9
Posted by: Mark Sigal | June 30, 2009 at 12:39 PM