Apple has been quietly creating a platform for managing branded currency in the form of its Passbook app and a newly filed patent.
If brands aren't careful, they will be as beholden to Apple for digital and mobile coupons, payments, and loyalty as record companies are for digital music, book publishers are to Amazon for digital books, and social game publishers are to Facebook. [Thank you Harvard Business Review] [By Mark Bonchek and Gene Cornfield | 07.16.13] Coupons. Gift cards. Loyalty points. These tried-and-true tools of the retail trade might not be as sexy as other forms of marketing. But together they account for more than $165 billion in purchasing power ($110 billion in gift cards purchased, $48 billion in loyalty points earned, and more than $5 billion in product coupons redeemed). That's almost as much as total e-commerce sales. These instruments share a common objective: to influence purchase decisions by equipping consumers with incremental spending power for specific brands and retailers. But consumers use them independently and individually (combining their value, when possible, takes a lot of manual effort), and store them in different places — often in drawers or folders where they lay forgotten and unused. This is changing as coupons, gift cards, and loyalty points all become digital — and, more important, mobile. Mobile enables all of this purchasing power to converge in one place, and potentially be used interchangeably and collectively, always within easy reach for consumers. What does this mean for retailers and brands? The mistake would be to think that they can keep doing what they have always done, but just add a little digital to it. Instead, retailers need to think about coupons, gift cards, and loyalty points not only as three separate tools, but as different forms of Branded Currency. Economists define currency as a store of value and a medium of exchange. All of these instruments are stores of value, and by going digital and mobile, they become far more effective mediums of exchange.
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A layer-by-layer fabrication tool lets researchers quickly form complicated biological tissue in three-dimensional space: Fabricated tissue could one day be implanted to replace damaged tissue in complicated organs like the heart. [Reproduced from MIT Technology Review] [By Mike Orcutt | 07.15.13] Muscle matrix: The image below, made using confocal microscopy, shows multiple thin layers of an elastic polymer (purple) and interwoven muscle tissue (green) formed from neonatal rat heart cells. By adapting a programmable device used to manufacture integrated circuits, researchers have devised a semi-automated process to build polymer scaffolds for guiding the development of three-dimensional heart tissue. The method, which entails layer-by-layer fabrication, will enable more precise investigation of the three-dimensional cues that drive cells to organize and form tissue—and could serve as a platform for the development of implantable organ tissue. Tissue engineers can already make three-dimensional constructs of relatively simple tissues. But highly ordered cellular architectures essential to the function of complicated organs like the heart are much harder to replicate. Tissue is grown in the lab by “seeding” scaffolds—usually composed of a porous elastic or gelatinous material—with cells meant to develop into specific tissues. Cardiac tissue’s function stems from its “multiscale architecture,” in which individual cells align to form multicellular fibers, which in turn form sheets of tissue, says Martin Kolewe, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT’s Institute of Medical Engineering and Science. Recent work has focused on determining how to guide cells to make them align correctly and form these hierarchical components. But such research has mostly been confined to two dimensions. Kolewe and lead investigator Lisa Freed of Draper Laboratory set out to develop a way to more precisely control the design of pore “networks,” with the aim of adding a third dimension. A new paper in Advanced Materials describes the research. Using fabrication techniques adapted from the microelectronics industry, the researchers made thin sheets of a polymer known as biorubber, patterned with microscale rectangular holes of uniform dimensions. They then adapted a programmable machine—used by the electronics industry to automatically stack thin material layers and build circuit boards and integrated circuit packages—to stack the porous biorubber sheets, one by one. A computer program helped precisely position the pores of each sheet relative to those of the sheet below. The researchers systematically tested various pore patterns and demonstrated ones that could produce “interwoven muscle-like bundles” out of mouse muscle cells and rat neonatal heart cells. They also showed they could control the directional orientation of the bundles, and that tissue built from the heart cells could beat in response to electrical stimulation. To get to where you want to go, ignore the deadly temptations that might spring up on an innovation journey. Stay focused on the purpose and the destination.
[Reproduced from HBS Business Review] [by Rosabeth Moss Kanter | 07.11.13] Any promising new initiative — a stand-alone business venture or an innovation in an established organization -- hits roadblocks and unexpected obstacles. Recently I've advised entrepreneurs and innovators about a different, seemingly better, dilemma: pop-up opportunities that look like short cuts to success. Too often, these turn out to be deadly temptations. Consider these cases (with names disguised to protect confidentiality): Bill's venture capital-backed business concept was to operate a new revenue-producing service for large U.S. professional organizations. In its first year, the venture landed two almost-committed pilot sites and a prospect pipeline for a multi-billion-dollar market. But almost at the same time, Bill was offered a lucrative deal to build a similar service for an English-speaking country outside the U.S. Feeling that the money was good and the chance to show credibility to U.S. customers even better, Bill took the deal, brushing aside numerous challenging differences and departures from his model. Then he was offered an even bigger international site in a developing country eager for American know-how, in partnership with a U.S. organization that could also be a customer. His financial backers urged him to take it — it would mean more revenue, fast. Suddenly Bill was in a different, less appealing business, jeopardizing building the U.S. business. In this story, that giant sucking sound you hear is the draining of time and energy from the core business by tempting almost-related opportunities. The danger comes from possibilities that are close enough to be plausible but take attention away from the building the main business and don't prove the concept anyway. Mary's temptations were slightly different but had similar consequences. She started a non-profit organization with lavish foundation funding and a high-profile board in order to spread an innovation in health care. This was a situation devoutly to be wished for by most social causes, but it proved limiting and almost fatal to Mary's project. The staff proliferated without clarity of purpose, and the organization became insular, looking inward and feeling they must be at the top of their field. Other groups courted the organization because it could bring funding, not because of a commitment to the innovation. Soon the goal became how to raise money, not how to support and improve the innovation. The organization took some government contracts to provide a somewhat-related but more routine service. Donors became confused about what the organization did. Private funding declined. The venture was in peril. |
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