Intrinsic Strategy

Spring is the longest (conference) season.

That’s the reason I have for not posting for most of the vernal equinox quarter. Spring is rife with industry trade shows and conferences, as it is in pretty much any industry. I’ve been to several.

However, to share what I’ve learned, I’ve live tweeted several events as @FrankCatalano and taken detailed notes, based in part on those tweets, for two conferences at the nexus of education technology: the Ed Tech Industry Summit from the Software and Information Industry Association, and the Content in Context Conference from the Association of Educational Publishers.

You can find my SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit notes here, and my AEP Content in Context Conference notes here as PDF files. For future reference, all notes will be archived on the Conference Notes page.

Now on to summer.

Update 7/8/10: I’ve added exhibit notes from ISTE 2010, in previous years known as the National Educational Computing Conference and now sporting the name of its sponsoring organization, the International Society for Technology in Education.

While the conference sessions at this ed tech event are generally well-documented by others, these ISTE 2010 notes focus on trends and observations about ed tech products and technologies shown in the exhibit hall.

I don’t usually post events where I’m attending and not speaking (since that would create a lot of clutter). But FiReGlobal: West Coast is an unusual event in that all the attendees are participants.

FiReGlobal — or Future in Review Global, a Seattle-based one-day version of the multi-day Future in Review Conference I’ve attended in the past — is the brainchild of Mark Anderson, a noted technology industry industry analyst with whom I’ve collaborated, competed and disagreed with over the  years (in a kind and gentle way apparently unheard of in most contemporary discourse). Yet there is no better thinker on global tech issues than Mark, and I’m delighted to attend this inaugural event in Seattle and to serve on the event’s Steering Committee. FiRe truly has been a cross-disciplinary tech event that has no peer.

If you’re free on Thursday, October 15, I encourage you to join me at FiReGlobal. Or better still — make yourself free to attend. I suspect you won’t regret it.

Washington’s Innovation Summit 2009 hosted a Who’s Who of leaders across various industries and government discussing the importance of innovation — and how to spur, nurture and maintain it.

Now, videos of the plenary sessions are available online, from “intrapreneur” coiner Gifford Pinchot’s fascinating discourse to McKinstry CEO Dean Allen’s conversation with Puget Sound Business Journal’s George Erb. And many sessions in between, including my own brief interview with Rogers Weed (former Microsoft VP and new director of the State of Washington Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development) and Mike Schwenk (VP and director of technology deployment at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory).

Find the program and video links here (look for the phrase “watch video”), or directly go to the Weed/Schwenk “Reflections on Innovation” video here.

Incidentally, all the lame moderator jokes have survived the transition to video. Unfortunately.

So what is this thing called blog?

Unlike some other blogs with which I’ve been involved going back to nearly the turn of the century, I have no illusions about readership or longevity of this effort. This is, out of the gate, a limited edition.

I’ve learned a lot of practical lessons about marketing: how it must align with business goals, how to introduce and balance branding where marketing has only been about sales support before, and how to make sure the initial intent survives what can be endless rounds of internal review. Everything from doing good competitive analysis, to choosing a new name, to tightly integrating strategic and tactical plans.

And over the next few months I’ll share what I’ve learned here in a manner unusual for a consultant: free of charge. (I’ll also provide asides on what I’m doing peripherally professionally, and observations on the marketing of others. Plus, I’ll continue experimenting with WordPress, beyond the earlier test posts.)

If you happen to find this blog, I hope you find it interesting and, more importantly, useful.