Trend Report

Branding and religion are talking about the same thing. They are spreading hope in a market full of fear. We can find the most successful branding experience in religions:
1. Religion and belief gives people an irreplaceable hope while people are facing fear in daily lives. The ceremonies are simple so that anyone can gain more at anytime, anyplace.
2. Hope, such as prayer, doesn’t require money. As long as the behavior has become a habit, it would be difficult to correct. (Research has it that any habit can be built under continuous behavior for 7 days.) Hope is a positive value that most people need and able to spread. Same as brand value, a brand value must provide a positive value so that people may be moved.

Nowadays, either traditional industries or high-tech industries (after Steve Jobs), “fear” is the only focus on branding, such as:
• Fear to lose control of technology.
• Fear to lose control of multi-identities.
• Fear to lose data information

However, a successful corporation should operate on “hope”, such as:
• Share hope.
• Find new hope
• Hope to be…

Advanced technology has enabled these hopes to be realized more easily. Besides, it would be much easier to find a group of people with the same hope in the internet era. Where hope exists, demand shows, and supply follows.

Innovation has the new meaning thanks to the technology growing.
The technology has shifted the importance proportion of creativity in the market. Yet it also transformed the structure and broad of entire market. These two different tensions has brought the essence of creativity artistic and marketized.

Creativity or the design as people said, the meaning should be:
To use the new logic to solve problems that old logics could not solve.

Take technology industry as example, the original “imagining space”, like the internet, is no longer needed after turning into an industry.
Hence, technology industry with higher educational background will naturally tend to modularize creativity when it’s hot.
When using the formula to turn 1 into 5 million, which most

Change 2 : “Value Chain” decomposed into “Value Added”

In the past, it was the era of value chain. All commercial strategies are focused on hot to effectively, rapidly construct an integrated value chain. Furthermore, they tried to expand the range covered by the scale of economy. The kind of vertical integration is not suitable for nowadays. In the era of brains group, vertical commercial strategies are not necessary. Thanks to interaction between technology and social crowd, opportunities of value added have been brought.

The opportunities allow corporations to connect a string of businesses by devoting and value adding to some selected points. However, it’s very difficult to recognize the correlation between these points. In most cases, the relationship between points requires imagination to connect, because there’s no absolute right or wrong. This is exactly the value that creativity can provide. Yet without traces, it’s very difficult to convince corporations or the industries.

Relatively, the easier way is to judge which “values” can be added, just like single aspect HR management system. This also tells the reason why schools, corporations or governments are trying to hold creativity training. However, thinking over, it’s actually upgrading some functions of the computer, rather than reboot. To learn creativity, we have to accept it first. It’s just like discarding the old PC and change a new Mac Pro. Through using the revolutionary new classic, creativity may be stimulated into a daily habit.

In the era of brains group, it’s useless to innovate on existed axis.In the new world, the greatest value of creativity (design) is to create new rationality through remixing of existing values.

The demand is no longer restricted to living necessary products. The supply has evolved into new necessities besides essentials. That is, currently what the market needs is not only a single supply-demand of function or price. When the supply is no longer oriented in single aspect, the R&D must cover several functions or missions.
What corporations afraid of are :
– When demand cannot be presented in numbers, how to plan ROI?
– When value, which is a invisible and untouchable asset, predominates the market, how do they allocate key resources?
Furthermore, it is the limitless rule which increases the difficulty to do so.

1. Modularize training vs. Inspirational ambience
Talents cannot be trained by modularized teaching plans, but to be formed slowly through designed inspirations.

2. Referencing solution vs. Imagining solution
Within success cases in emerging markets, there are a lot of highly characterized new corporations. As a result, most cases are not suitable to refer to. In that case, imagination will be much more important than searching information.

3. 1+1>2 vs. 1+X>Y
The expansion of value cannot be presented by linear format, so the concept of ”+1” is not equal to “1” from the perspective of value. To be short, when the organization hires someone and expects him/her to work as 1.5 human or more, the “non-logical inequality” would be where the value exists.
However in the creative market, the inequality is difficult to be quantified. Yet unable to be quantified doesn’t represent not important nor lack of commercial value.

4. Training vs. Enlightening
Understanding and deconstruction are the new innovative value. Training cannot enhance one’s ability to understand. It usually requires understanding after thinking and insight after deconstruction. These can only be given through enlightening. That is the value of innovative ability.
So, isn’t the key of education lies in environment design rather than course design?