The fourth case study about wrapping artists, Christo and Jean-Claude

The last case study seemed hardest for me, mainly because the idea of making huge temporary environmental installations with loads of money felt like a total waste of time and money. Well, maybe I somehow understood part of this, and in fact, it already seems like a pretty good business. The case study is available here.

The first thing that felt strange in this, was the actions of banks. How could the artists acquire a line of credit for this kind of things? But after I started to think the case more, it seems like the banks were the winners. For example, The Bank Leu, that financed The Gates installation, gave a lot of additional value to its clients and gained a lot of fame in addition to polishing its image.

Well anyways, the artworks look nice and the installations are breathtaking. Some of these can be seen from Christo's and Jean-Claude's website.

Third case study about AtomShockwave

The third case is about Mika Salmi and Atom Films, a short film business run mainly on internet. The case study can be found here.

The problem in this case is that after merging of Atom Films and Shockwave and after bursting of IT bubble, the two parts of new merged company are off the balance. The Atom Films' income comes mainly from advertisements and the future of ad business looks pretty dark. The Shockwave part has brighter future and it's easy to come up few attractive business models for it. It seems like the Atom Films is holding back the Shockwave.

So what to do?

Apple iPhone is coming

It seems that my arguments on one of the previous posts are a bit collapsing as the release of Apple iPhone seems to move from rumours to reality. :)

Well, this shows that Apple has started to converge different technologies and products into one single product. I guess the future shows how Apple has done its homework and how successful product it will be able to create...

Creative way to market through YouTube

YouTube has been discussed a lot lately because Google bought it and, at least in Finland, because some broadcasters are considering suing YouTube and the people uploading their content to the pages. I shortly touched this subject on "Creativity and business" post. Furthermore, marketing on YouTube was also considered with an example from a smaller Finnish broadcaster SubTV and its new comedy series. Now there is a short interview (in Finnish) of SubTV's On-Air Promotion Editor, Tapio Haaja uploaded on Youtube:



To translate the idea: The idea was to add few clips to YouTube and then write on bigger Finnish internet forums something like: "I found accidentally these clips from a new comedy series. Looks pretty good." After a while almost 100 000 people (a lot of people on Finnish scale) had seen those clips. So with this simple idea to use these new tools creatively, the company made a very successful and effective marketing campaign with almost zero budget. Extremely good example on blue ocean thinking, lower costs and better results together.

Individual readings for the course (business, open source and creative commons)

Just case studies and some discussion around it is not enough for this course. In parallel with the case study work each student has some individual readings. I felt like I would like to read about open source and creative commons, after all those were the main issues that made me participate this course. I'm also interested in open source and web 2.0 business models. How do you make money from it? Who has your money and how do you get it from them?

So from these viewpoints I found three different books. First one was from our course instructors, The Creative Economy: How people make money from ideas by John Howkins. This was just the kind of practical book that give a simple examples and explanations on how to start from an idea and make it profitable.

The other two books are about open source and creative commons. The other is written by Lawrence Lessig, who is strongly encouraging people to publish their writings under creative commons licence. He also does as he preaches, so the book, Free culture, is also available for free from the website. The second one is more interesting from my point of view. This is written by Henrik Ingo, who used to work at the same company I'm currently working and also is my friend's brother. He published Avoin Elämä in April 2005 and it's currently also available in English.

So next task is to read a bit and try to find a common ground for these different books and try to learn something new about creativity and how open source helps it and business. Hopefully I'll have time to write something during next week. Maybe I'll start with the creative commons and apply it with my blog...

Scrapbook and interesting pages

In addition to case studies and reflections on them, a portfolio should contain also interesting articles and news showing a bit what you have been studying and reading during the course. This also gives the portfolio a little bit of your own personality.

I figured out that I could follow the same practices as with the case studies and use web 2.0 tools for collecting links and articles. So I'll add related links to my del.icio.us page with managing_dynamics tag and as a scrapbook I'll use my Flickr page where I'll scan articles that seem to be interesting in some way. Just listing the interesting articles etc. isn't enough, so I'll try to write some thoughts on the articles and link them on this blog too.

Hmm, using Flickr as a scrapbook seemed like a great (and creative) idea. Something that Flickr is not meant to be used for, but the customers are creative enough to use it for that. After a quick search on Flickr, I have to admit that I'm not the most creative person. But hey, there's only 11 497 pictures found with "scrapbook" word...

Second case study about Apple iPod

After a busy week at work I finally have some time to do some tasks related to Managing Dynamics course portfolio. So here's the second case study about Apple iPod. I have to admit that I'm not sure what is the extremely creative part about Apple iPod, but it may be because I think creativity as being something the creators of the product have and not as the course instructors who encourage us to think that the creativity comes from customers using it in creative ways. I guess I'll need to meditate on this for a while. :)

Well, anyways. I feel like Apple iPod is in trouble. Very much competition and mobile phones with better and better digital music players makes everything hard. The trend is toward higher convergence. Meaning that the iPods as just digital music players will disappear and convergent devices with mobile phones, digital music players, games and Internet connections will take over. At least from my view this seems to be the most logical future view.