Corporations need to follow trends and to innovate just to stay alive. What can they learn from the chaotic democracy of the Net?

by David Holt

Context is the world we live in. Like fish in water, we tend not to see it, so we’re at its mercy. Then there’s that other invisible actor: luck.

An example of both processes: Walking into the World Trade and Convention Centre in Halifax, I’m looking for Jeremy Gutsche, a just-30 wunderkind who created Trendhunter.com. By chance, my opportunistic friend, Peter Spurway, is in the lobby; he points to a door and advises, “He’s in there. Go on in.”

Inside, a young guy in jeans and a sports jacket is hunched over a laptop. It’s Gutsche. He points to the screen: his baby, Trendhunter.com, is up. It gets eight million hits a month. He introduces me to the woman beside him, Pearl Blay, one of the top trendhunters who writes about 100 posts a month. Then he’s on his way up the hall to speak at Nova Scotia Business Inc.’s Geared for Growth conference.

Gutsche morphed from the financial sector, where he ran a billion-dollar portfolio for Capital One Canada, to his new career, stopping along the way to study innovation at the Stanford business school. He consults on innovation for corporations and roams the ever-morphing grassroots democracy of the Net. The 20,000 bloggers on his site have found 25,000 trends; the editors find clusters among the trends. It all happens fast.

Gutsche prowls the stage with the energy of a kid, talking about “unlocking cool” and “trendspotting”—identifying emerging shifts in social behaviour and aspiration. By the way, he adds, “Popular is no longer cool.” He inhabits the viral world of micro-trends where consumers create content and advocate brands—where a video of Filipino prisoners dancing gets 15 million views, where everything can be remixed. He shows a video of an awkward geek becoming a drummer via cut, edit, remix. He cites a few new trends: helicopter yoga, Braille tattoos, toupees for babies, Sarah Palin. He races through a tip that corporations can use to become more innovative: inspire people who are curious. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Scan the market, find clusters of inspiration, expand on them, “infectiously market” them.

Not only do corporations often fail to innovate, but they are often victims of their own success. He tells of typewriter powerhouse Smith Corona, whose 100 years of market dominance led it to miss the computer revolution. Its board killed a deal with Acer, which went on to become a successful PC maker; SC went bankrupt. “Structural framing dictates outcome,” he says. The power of context.

“Just as success creates complacency, you need failure,” says Gutsche, quoting the Chinese concept of wei ji: crisis equals opportunity. At the BBC, the CEO and CFO controlled innovation and were losing market share, so they set up a “gambling fund” to produce a few shows that had failed to pass the corporate test. One show given a second chance was The Office, which became their biggest hit ever.

The trick is to look at the deeper connections behind the more obvious trends—to filter the flood of information to find the “nuggets of inspiration.” Hunt, cluster, remix, reset. Then market by cultural infection. “If your product connects, your story travels far. So have a well-packaged story and obsess about it. Can you say what you are trying to do in seven words or less?”

Later I call Pearl Blay, who it turns out is a government scientist living in Halifax. She’s an expert blogger and the No. 8 trendhunter on the site. She also teaches jewelry making (“an addictive hobby”); her site is beadinggem.com.

Blay gives me a blogging lesson: content is king. Post regularly, about once a day, so you need to write fast in a personal style. Advertise socially and spend time with the reader you hope to get. It’s a long-term commitment. Like most bloggers, she isn’t in it for the money (though the top guns, most in technology, can earn six figures via advertising). Beadinggem.com and its blog started simply as a way to connect jewelry makers.

Regarding trends, Blay says 88% of her posts have been picked up by Trendhunter.com. She does a lot of searches and feeds. “We post it, and interest zooms up,” she says. “It’s a clue to what people find interesting.” This all relates to her day job too: scientists make their living searching for trends and patterns, and they are insatiably curious.

Now some of Jeremy Gutsche’s Halifax talk is up on his site. It’s better than what I remember; it has been edited, remixed.

Yeah, remix. That’s as good a definition as any for innovation.

David Holt is a writer and consultant on strategy and communications. He can be reached at dholt@eastlink.ca.