“It was the best of times and the worst of times”, Charles Dickens was writing about the French Revolution, but he could just as well be writing about the business climate today.
The dark clouds of high unemployment, tight credit and soaring deficits does have a silver lining, especially if you are an entrepreneur or a wannabe entrepreneur. In the search for the next blockbuster, companies have begun, at an ever increasing rate, turning to open innovation as part of their business development strategy. The latest to join is Glaxo Smith Kline. Their Consumer Products Division has rolled out a new open innovation portal. To spread awareness of this they are using social media, one outlet is a rich media site devoted to accelerating commercialization http://www.urweb.tv . GSK created a short two minute promo and click through banners to take interested parties to their new portal.
MMC Productions in Chapel Hill, NC initial designed urweb.tv as a repository for target market rich media projects undertaken for University and Federal Laboratories such as, NC State, Wake Forest, NASA, the Department of Defense and others. To promote these technologies for commercialization, MMC created a customized rich media marketing vehicle called a Cyberpitch, consisting of a high quality embedded video, text, images, links to papers and contact information. All their clients had to do was send a link to a prospect and with the click of the mouse they could watch a video and find all sorts of useful information about the technology.
Over time through a mixture of targeted and viral marketing, www.urweb.tv gained a visitor profile of economic development agencies, multi nationals, small businesses, as well as scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs and investors. It was never going to a YouTube or a Hulu with millions of hits, but it did have a growing track record of success and a very highly desirable hard-to-reach audience. One that is now being leverage by companies such as Procter and Gamble and Glaxo Smith Kline Consumer Products as a social media outlet for open innovation.
So while the economy is still shaky, the future uncertain, opportunity beckons, and the next “big” blockbuster could be just a couple of clicks away.
