Last Saturday, at the Whats Next meetup in Stockholm I was fortunate enough to meet with a bunch of people that have truly inspired me. They include Thomas Wennström (producer and host of the Whats Next podcast), Erik Wahlfors (co-founder of Soundcloud), and Tomas Seo (producer and co-host of the Voccine podcast). Tomas has recently founded Phorecast, and is together with Christina Jeurling and Suzanne Hamilton creating a fascinating, and of course innovative, business concept.
Imagine having two teams of carefully selected leading, independent, and mult-disciplinary innovators, domain experts, and doers compete for three days. All with the sole objective to innovate for your organization. That is what you get when you engage Phorecast. At least that is my impression after meeting Tomas again today. And I really like their approach for a number of reasons.
First of all, the whole process is based on scientific research as well as personally grounded experiences. This includes for example the aspect of how to manage a small group of people with different knowledge, agendas and personalities. And that innovations are useless for an organization not built to realize novel, perhaps disruptive, ideas. Hence not a customer Phorecast would even consider.
Second, the whole Phorecast idea is based on an understanding of the value when people from different disciplines meet. Take for example the case of the Post-it (TM). The underlying adeshive was discovered by Dr. Spencer SIlver in 1968. Then it took six years until Art Fry, another 3M scientist, got the important idea about how the adeshive could be used (read more at 3M). Or as the Härén brothers puts it: a new idea is simply two old ideas put together in a novel way. A task greatly fascilitated when different brains meet.
Third, their marketing approach includes the use of social media (which perhaps is the main thing motivating this post). Their website is built with WordPress, news are in the form of blog posts which offers RSS-feeds as well as commenting functions. Hence, I bet I do not even have to send Tomas an e-mail about that I have published this post. WordPress will automatically inform him about it. A Facebook page is of course up and running. Furthermore, the Phorecast Podcast does right from the start contain a number of mind blowing interviews with fantastic personalities like Sir Ken Robinson, Jennifer Lynn Aaker, and Wylie Defresne. Hence they generously share insights and at the same time indicate what type of social networks they belong to. The hours I have spent listening so far gave me new insights as well as pleasure. Start by listening to Sir Ken’s idea sharing with Christina (because it is about a subject dear to me) Of course you can subscribe for free through iTunes and any mobile player, including the iPhone.
I could go on, but choose to advise you to visit their web site and learn more about the Phorecast process. And to be true, so far it is just a little bit more than an idea itself. With only one case (for JCDecaux Sweden) so far they need more delivery to further prove their value. I really hope they find a sufficient number of clients that are willing to test the concepts more. Perhaps you are the one? (you need good money though, Phorecasting costs substantially more than a bottle of Absinthe :-)
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