Can Media Companies Deliver Sustainable Innovation?

This was another busy and productive week at Nine Lives Media inc. While Amy Katz continued to build out several business relationships and sponsorships, I applied polish to our latest site launch (Works With U) and also moderated events in Minneapolis, New York and Boston.

During the event in New York, which focused on Business Analytics, a key theme emerged: How do you drive sustainable innovation in your company? I know: Everyone is abusing the “innovation” word these days. But I rather like the term “sustainable innovation.” It describes a company that continually reinvents its products and services — even before such moves are necessary.

A case in point is Apple: When Microsoft finally countered the iPod with the Zune, Apple was just about ready to move onto the iPhone. The Apple innovation pipeline, it seems, is always filled with a new product. Is that simply because Steve Jobs is an insanely cool tyrant who demands perfection? Or is there some other secret to sustainable innovation?

Measure Everything

During the New York conference — featuring speakers from SAS, Accenture and a major bank — there was a key takeaway for attendees: Sometimes, you can innovate based on your own hunches. But for sustainable innovation, you need to come to meetings armed with reliable data. You must find, analyze and exploit key metrics to beat the competition. And you must continually tweak those metrics.

For instance, The Oakland A’s baseball franchise used a key metric — On Base Percentage — to build a successful franchise earlier this decade, noted Jeanne Harris, co-author of Competing on Analytics, a best-selling book that describes how high-performance organizations leverage analytics.

But the A’s lost their competitive advantage as rivals baseball clubs soon focused on that On Base Percentage metric. The A’s have yet to find that “next metric” to leap ahead of rivals.

How do metrics help businesses innovate? Major retailers, for instance, often use metrics such as weather patterns, traffic patterns, population densities and rival store locations to predict the performance of specific store locations, noted Mark Moorman, a member of SAS’s office of the  CTO. (Here’s a webcast featuring more thoughts from Moorman.)

Analytics In Small Business

But can a small business, such as Nine Lives Media Inc., leverage analytics to drive sustainable innovation? Absolutely. Let me give you two quick examples.

The VAR Guy, our anonymous blogger, noticed Web traffic spikes in 2007 whenever he wrote about specific terms related to the managed services market. Without revealing which metrics we zeroed in on, we soon realized readers craved more information about the managed services market. We moved fast to capitalize on the information, and soon launched MSPmentor, the ultimate guide to managed services.

Now, for a second example: We kept hearing anecdotal information about Ubuntu Linux’s momentum on PC desktops. Dell’s decision to preload Ubuntu on selected in PCs in mid-2007 was interesting, but was this really an emerging market?

We blogged a bit about Ubuntu and about 20 related terms, analyzed the reader traffic patterns, and saw some key data points that told us the market craved a media site focused on Ubunu Linux. The result is Works With U, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

Where does Nine Lives Media Inc. go from here? Analytics, facts and data points will continue to influence our decisions. But I also think we’ll also play some hunches and trust our instincts as we continue to evolve our existing sites — and launch new ones.

At some point, as we mature, sustainable innovation will become increasingly difficult. We may get bogged down in legacy processes and legacy web sites. I fear that day. But right now, we’re too busy to worry about such concerns. In fact, sustainable innovation is downright fun right now for us. I intend to make this feeling last for as long as possible.