I suspect that most of you reading this blog post are interested in applications and are not Minnesota Timberwolves junkies or have some strange fix for the silly Trix rabbit.

Last week was an interesting week.  I found you can learn a lot about application marketing by listening to other successful businesses. 

I started off the week working with my team here at W3i on finalizing a survey for anyone in our industry on the topic of Application Distribution And Business Models.  For the first time, W3i offered a free White Paper to contacts who participated in the survey.  Immediately, we saw the number of completed surveys per solicitation outperform our wildest expectations (feel free to participate if you like).

On Wednesday, I headed to the Twin Cities for the PDMA event being hosted by General Mills’ iSquad team.  iSquad is a specialized business unit which helps facilitate new product development/innovation for Generall Mills.  General Mills sells $15B+ of food every year and has hundreds of products including my very own favorite, Trix cereal.  I hear a lot about General Mills’ world class marketing team, and after attending their presentation, I was not let down.

The iSquad team delivered a presentation on innovating innovation.  The four key aspects they outlined for their process were.

• Find Great Ideas Regularly
  • Using the I3 approach to identify great ideas.
    • Immersion – Understand the problem
    • Interaction – Experience the problem
    • Idea Creation – Solve the problem
• Expand Available Talent
  • Isaac Newton said it best “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” meaning you should leverage the best internal and external knowledge available so that you are not inefficiently discovering things which were already discovered. 
  • Similarly, you could think about partnering with other companies to increase your available talent
• Get Smarter Sooner
  • A new product blunder cost the company $16M which could have been prevented if they would have released an earlier prototype of the product and understood how it would be used.  Get Smarter Sooner is a commitment they have to get high quality, but not perfect, products to market to real consumers faster so that they have a better understanding of the opportunity/challenges for the product.
• Pave A New Way
  • They try to work within their organization to have cross-functional resources involved in new product development so that as the new product is developed and deployed there are experts who are prepared to help with the transition post-launch.

Last night Kurt Rambis (the new head coach for the Minnesota Timberwolves and NBA legend) and players (7th overall draft pick Johnny Flynn and Ryan Gomes) presented my brother and co-founder, Rob and I with the The Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal’s 2009 Young Entrepreneur Award. Kurt spoke about the Timberwolves need to innovate if they are to become more effective than their recent struggles. The Timberwolves sponsored the event to engage the business community (potential customers of their corporate suites, etc.) with the major changes underway with the franchise. The changes to the front office, coaching staff, and players have led to a totally new team for 2009/10. 70% of the roster is comprised of players that were not on the team last year. Rambis spoke a lot about the personnel changes made as well as his process, knowledge, and experience that led to his past success (7 championships as a player/coach with the Lakers). I was quite surprised by the interaction and openness by the Timberwolves coach in responding to questions and sharing his perspective on the team. I believe that Kurt will be a great coach and a welcomed member of the community.

As VP of Corporate Strategy, I oversee the Product Management team here at W3i. We are constantly soliciting our business contacts and users for feedback so that we can be more tuned in with their needs.

Click here to complete the Application Distribution and Business Models Survey (only takes 10 to 15 minutes to complete) and you’ll receive a free White Paper to help you become more informed on this subject and support innovation with your application business.

A special thanks to all of the many users and business contacts who have provided feedback which have helped W3i get to where it is at today.

Ryan Weber, Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Co-Founder, W3i, LLC
Entrepreneur and pioneer of Internet marketing focusing on increasing revenue and distribution for digital downloads.