The challenges of openness & collective intelligence

The language of a fluid, non-linear world of mutuality

Simon Sinek: What, How, Why & Trust

Shape matters more than size

Due to fundamental long-term changes in consumer (media consumption & purchase) behavior, media companies are no longer content providers...they are in the conversation business.

Media companies - staffed and structured to be content providers in a classical Media Value Chain - need to come to terms with what they are becoming. In order to succeed:

1. Doing nothing is not an option
Media companies need to find a new Smart (a new mash-up of capabilities and business model innovation across their network) & Sustainable Sweet Spot within the unfolding Marketing Eco System.

2. Resizing is not enough, shape matters more than size
The cost reduction initiatives to keep traditional media companies commercially viable will remain important (shareholders focus on stripping out cost to maintain earnings per share), but will not suffice. Slimmed-down media companies will have to evolve further than they have done to date and need to change shape (long-term focus) as well as size (short-term focus). Key will be the ability to reshape traditional business models and organisational structures to best exploit the opportunities that ongoing technological development and digital transformation offers. A strategic approach, taking account of structure, governance and culture, identifies a more sustainable model for operating in the unfolding Marketing Eco System.

Deeply embedded ways of working need to be changed. Data analytics and real-time consumer insight have not traditionally been core competencies of media companies, while data analytics will become fundamental to any content-based organisation.

Conclusion: Traditional media companies need a very different kind of skill set to generate the new revenue streams that are going to be very important going forward. The most succesfull status-quo-challenger, the most agile skill-set-winner of tomorrow, takes it all.

Do you want to know more about Sanoma's beliefs on the future playing field of media companies? Watch this!

David de Boer, Manager Marketing Intelligence Sales, Sanoma

(source: Deloitte/Spencer Stuart, Ed Shedd & Grant Duncan, "Why agility must follow austerity in the new digital age", june 2010)

10 strategic technologies to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency

Gartner highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2011.

A strategic technology

• Is one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.
• May be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. As such, these technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives.

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2011 are:

1. Cloud Computing. Cloud computing services exist along a spectrum from open public to closed private. The next three years will see the delivery of a range of cloud service approaches that fall between these two extremes. Vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor's public cloud service technologies (software and/or hardware) and methodologies (i.e., best practices to build and run the service) in a form that can be implemented inside the consumer's enterprise. Many will also offer management services to remotely manage the cloud service implementation. Gartner expects large enterprises to have a dynamic sourcing team in place by 2012 that is responsible for ongoing cloudsourcing decisions and management.
2. Mobile Applications and Media Tablets. Gartner estimates that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing an ideal environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. Mobile devices are becoming computers in their own right, with an astounding amount of processing ability and bandwidth. There are already hundreds of thousands of applications for platforms like the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market (only for the one platform) and need for unique coding. The quality of the experience of applications on these devices, which can apply location, motion and other context in their behavior, is leading customers to interact with companies preferentially through mobile devices. This has lead to a race to push out applications as a competitive tool to improve relationships and gain advantage over competitors whose interfaces are purely browser-based.
3. Social Communications and Collaboration. Social media can be divided into: (1) Social networking —social profile management products, such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster as well as social networking analysis (SNA) technologies that employ algorithms to understand and utilize human relationships for the discovery of people and expertise. (2) Social collaboration —technologies, such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative office, and crowdsourcing. (3)Social publishing —technologies that assist communities in pooling individual content into a usable and community accessible content repository such as YouTube and flickr. (4) Social feedback - gaining feedback and opinion from the community on specific items as witnessed on YouTube, flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Amazon. Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications. Companies should bring together their social CRM, internal communications and collaboration, and public social site initiatives into a coordinated strategy.
4. Video. Video is not a new media form, but its use as a standard media type used in non-media companies is expanding rapidly. Technology trends in digital photography, consumer electronics, the web, social software, unified communications, digital and Internet-based television and mobile computing are all reaching critical tipping points that bring video into the mainstream. Over the next three years Gartner believes that video will become a commonplace content type and interaction model for most users, and by 2013, more than 25 percent of the content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio.
5. Next Generation Analytics. Increasing compute capabilities of computers including mobile devices along with improving connectivity are enabling a shift in how businesses support operational decisions. It is becoming possible to run simulations or models to predict the future outcome, rather than to simply provide backward looking data about past interactions, and to do these predictions in real-time to support each individual business action. While this may require significant changes to existing operational and business intelligence infrastructure, the potential exists to unlock significant improvements in business results and other success rates.
6. Social Analytics. Social analytics describes the process of measuring, analyzing and nterpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas. These interactions may occur on social software applications used in the workplace, in internally or externally facing communities or on the social web. Social analytics is an umbrella term that includes a number of specialized analysis techniques such as social filtering, social-network analysis, sentiment analysis and social-media analytics. Social network analysis tools are useful for examining social structure and interdependencies as well as the work patterns of individuals, groups or organizations. Social network analysis involves collecting data from multiple sources, identifying relationships, and evaluating the impact, quality or effectiveness of a relationship.
7. Context-Aware Computing. Context-aware computing centers on the concept of using information about an end user or object’s environment, activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end user. The end user may be a customer, business partner or employee. A contextually aware system anticipates the user's needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customized content, product or service. Gartner predicts that by 2013, more than half of Fortune 500 companies will have context-aware computing initiatives and by 2016, one-third of worldwide mobile consumer marketing will be context-awareness-based.
8. Storage Class Memory. Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. It also offers a new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages — space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them. Unlike RAM, the main memory in servers and PCs, flash memory is persistent even when power is removed. In that way, it looks more like disk drives where information is placed and must survive power-downs and reboots. Given the cost premium, simply building solid state disk drives from flash will tie up that valuable space on all the data in a file or entire volume, while a new explicitly addressed layer, not part of the file system, permits targeted placement of only the high-leverage items of information that need to experience the mix of performance and persistence available with flash memory.
9. Ubiquitous Computing. The work of Mark Weiser and other researchers at Xerox's PARC paints a picture of the coming third wave of computing where computers are invisibly embedded into the world. As computers proliferate and as everyday objects are given the ability to communicate with RFID tags and their successors, networks will approach and surpass the scale that can be managed in traditional centralized ways. This leads to the important trend of imbuing computing systems into operational technology, whether done as calming technology or explicitly managed and integrated with IT. In addition, it gives us important guidance on what to expect with proliferating personal devices, the effect of consumerization on IT decisions, and the necessary capabilities that will be driven by the pressure of rapid inflation in the number of computers for each person.
10. Fabric-Based Infrastructure and Computers. A fabric-based computer is a modular form of computing where a system can be aggregated from separate building-block modules connected over a fabric or switched backplane. In its basic form, a fabric-based computer comprises a separate processor, memory, I/O, and offload modules (GPU, NPU, etc.) that are connected to a switched interconnect and, importantly, the software required to configure and manage the resulting system(s). The fabric-based infrastructure (FBI) model abstracts physical resources — processor cores, network bandwidth and links and storage — into pools of resources that are managed by the Fabric Resource Pool Manager (FRPM), software functionality. The FRPM in turn is driven by the Real Time Infrastructure (RTI) Service Governor software component. An FBI can be supplied by a single vendor or by a group of vendors working closely together, or by an integrator — internal or external.

The new Brand Management: Transmedia (branded content) storymaking in combination with 'game dynamics'

After finishing building a social layer, a next layer - the game layar - is unfolding: a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape commerce.

By now, we are used to letting Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web; building a 'social layer' on top of the real world. At TEDxBoston, Seth Priebatsch looks at the next layer in progress: the 'game layer', a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape the marketing eco system (marketing, communication and commerce).




At TEDxTransmedia, Dan Hon - a senior member of the Wieden + Kennedy London creative department, specialized in games, play and new ways of storytelling - gives more insight into 'game dynamics'.




We are bringing 'game dymanics' into more aspects of our lives, spending countless hours - and real money - exploring virtual worlds for imaginary treasures. Why? Because games are perfectly tuned to dole out rewards that engage the brain and keep us questing for more.









We are entering the Transmedia era (I define transmedia as "a mashup of 'reality'+'social layer'+ 'game dynamics'") in which:

1. The unfolding Marketing Eco System brings us new formats and business models of commerce;
2. Brand Management (control, scripted dialogue, periodic feedback) transforms into Brand Stewardship (open, transmedia conversation, 24/7 feedback);
3. Brand Stewardship is in perpetual beta. Companies that shorten the learning loop c.q. the feedback loop, that iterate faster, will do better.
   
   
   
   
   
   Culture Mapping, managing brands in a social economy

   View more presentations from Tim Stock.
   
   
   David de Boer, Manager Marketing Intelligence Sales, Sanoma

We’re not going from a world of Business Model A to one of Business Model B, we’re going from Business Model A to Business Models A to Z (Clay Shirky)

The marketing eco system unfolds. Evidence that this transformation is already in full swing is clear.
When you consider how this unfolding marketing eco system might look, with, among other things, digitally augmented realities, contextual branding, and the growth of emotional profiling, it is time to determine a strategy to capitalise on these opportunities.

Or better, it WAS time to determine a strategy. Media firms need to act now if they are to survive and prosper as the marketing eco system unfolds. Falling advertising revenues and the widespread availability of free content are eroding the value of traditional value chain based business models.

Understanding of what the unfolding marketing eco system looks like may be uncertain, but a number of priorities can be identified in navigating the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Priority 1. The importance of building and maintaining trust. Trust is seen as the key to gaining access to more profitable relationships with B2C individuals and competitive differentiation. B2C individuals have to feel comfortable enough to open up their privacy walls, needed to deepen their relationship for personal - contextualised - experiences;

Priority 2. Preparing for a more complex network of B2B partnerships. In the long run, digitization will be characterised by alliances between specialist providers;

Priority 3. Learn how to be able to - realtime - personalize your branded content to be personal relevant enough to activate the specific targeted B2C individual;

Priority 4. Learn how to be able to - realtime - calculate and apply the most - contextualised - optimal combination of business models for each specific generated consumer touch point, while continuously generating a stream of 1.000.000 consumer touchpoints per second.

Media firms have to do what they've always done (but in a completely different way, in a completely different mindset): build their B2C relationships based on trust, deliver engaging content and ensure they get paid for it.

These 4 priorities are steps that mediamarketleaders need to take today. It is a question of having in place the systems to support these new ways of working. Media firms need to ask themselves whether their current capabilities are suited for the work that is going to be needed.

Customer management strategies are the foundation for developing deeper relationships with B2C and B2B customers and building this - needed - trust. The supporting systems however need to go beyond the simple retention of customer data. In the unfolding marketing eco system, B2C customers will expect a seamless experience across all of their devices and media firms will have to support this expectation, able to track and manage B2C consumer activity irrespective of the channel. Systems need to provide intelligence on the B2C customer bases' habits, preferences and the different segments that exist within it. Only with this intelligence and analysis will the players in the marketing eco system be in a position to begin making the personalised recommendations and offers that build trust and foster deeper B2C customer relationships.

Extending communities of B2B partners brings a whole new level of complexity to operations. Ensuring that the media company and its B2B partners are quickly rewarded for their 'offerings' could mean supporting the transactions of millions of B2C customers and allocating money instantly to the right pots. Media companies will need the control and flexibility to be able to charge for any service or event according to payment type, network or geography.

As flat fee broadband capacity increases and high-end mobile devices become ever smarter and enter the mainstream, the trends identified are only likely to accelerate. Media firms need to decide today where they see their place (their SmartSweetSpot) in the digital future and what they have to do to get there.

Transformation of Media Companies

According to Accenture research and a panel discussion at the 2008 Accenture Global Convergence Forum, media companies need to take four critical steps to be a winner in the-next-generation-media-industry:

• Focus on strengths and use them across multiple channels
• Understand and get to know B2C and B2B consumers better
• Give existing workforce and new talent as much autonomy as realistically possible.
• Get the cost base right.

While an exciting future may loom on the horizon, there are major challenges around strategic execution, the panelists said. In the “age of execution,” the potential to relate to and engage with B2C and B2B consumers is more profound than ever before. Media companies must be prepared to change much more and much faster than in any other time in their recent history.

Recently, Patty Maes of MIT woke up Microsoft by demonstrating that their vision of 2019 is already technically possible today.....and within reach for every consumer. The wearable device of Patty Maes - that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data - costs only about $350.

Will Apple bring us our 'next level Iphone' and introduce an Apple designed Patty Maes' device this autumn?

Proliferating technology is enabling ubiquitous media. This, in turn, is facilitating the shift in consumption habits and content participation and creating huge growth opportunities for media companies.

Media companies will need to transition from analogue, offline delivery to integrated, file-based, digital enterprises. Media companies that want to survive are well-advised to start their path toward it today if they have nor done so already.

But turning around media organizations is a huge, and typically slow, undertaking. To learn more about how prepared the industry is to make this transformation and take advantage of industry change, Accenture interviewed more than 100 of the world’s top media executives.

The research results show that two out of three industry organizations have less than 40 percent of the capabilities to complete the transformation successfully and become a true digital, high performance business. And this statistic is likely overstated.

32 percent of respondents generated less than 10 percent of their 2007 revenues from nonlinear consumption (downloads and on-demand broadcasts, for example). And only a small minority—9 percent—have broken the 25 percent barrier.

A critical component of enabling transformational capabilities quickly and effectively is an integrated multi-platform. About 63 percent of respondents said they are pursuing a three-screen distribution strategy—using TV, online and mobile. However in doing so, at least 30 percent of them are using a completely siloed approach, which has been shown to result in low customer satisfaction and lost revenues.

An integrated, multi-platform, value-creation-network capability will help media companies find new ways to reach consumers, to be more valuable for consumers, to respond to how and where they access media and make digital content available to consumers whenever and wherever they want it. The panel saw this as the largest growth driver for content companies over the next five years. It would appear, then, that the media market is no longer characterized by the big eating the small but the fast eating the slow.

David de Boer, Head of B2B Marketing, Sanoma Uitgevers, The Netherlands

Sanoma will be moving beyond the serving ads advertising model.

Our mobile devices become the remote control for our daily lives. This will generate data (of a dimension which we have never had before), which in turn provides Sanoma the means to really increase our value for our B2C customers (providers of the data) and our B2B customers. It provides Sanoma the means to become more relevant at the right time and place, and transform the accepted practices of marketing, media and commercial communication.

Data has always been used in marketing, but it has been on a path of evolution. Three key stages can be identified:

• Stage 1: Socio-demographics: age, gender, postal code, occupation, lifestyle, mentality.
• Stage 2: Context sensitive: search domain/subject, time, location, mood
• Stage 3: Social Marketing Intelligence: the combination of market segmentation and context, combined with customer behavior and social network profiles.
  

Marketing-, media-, commercial communication-decisions and data need to be symbiotically connected to each other to optimalize value, and to optimalize (marketing) resources for all partners (B2C customer, B2B customer, Sanoma). It this way the resources of Sanoma and our partners can be deployed intelligently at the right place and at the right time to create optimal value for all partners/participants/actors, while applying the optimal business-model(s) for that specific 'constellation' at that specific moment.

The decision on how much to spend and where to allocate (marketing- and media-) resources will evolve:

• the once-siloed 'static'data warehouse becomes a living 'enabler' of making realtime (marketing- and media-) resource-allocation-decisions on a continiuous basis.

The effort and attention of marketing has always been focused on one aspect of marketing (serving ads). We have to get used to leave this one dimensional view behind us, when one begins to realise how a data-driven approach to marketing can be transformational by offering an opportunity to remove 'static' organisational silos that truly hinder that continious, fluid, dynamic process of resource-optimalization.

The way forward is to better understand what data Sanoma (and Sanoma's partners) do already have and will generate. We have to think about how that data gets better through user-interaction [through interaction with our B2C and B2C customers] and take care of 'co-produced offerings' (services/products/applications) for those partners that give them back the value of that data.

Which players in the media-industry are (culturally) able to make this fundamental change of mindset and transform succesfully? The timing of this necessary transition is crucial. So time will tell us.

David de Boer, Head of B2B Marketing, Sanoma Uitgevers, The Netherlands

Sanoma's 'value constellation strategy' in the post-assembly-line media eco system

The media company Sanoma is a collective mind of a large group of over 20.000 individuals.

Strategy is the art of creating value. It provides the intellectual frameworks (conceptual models) and governing ideas that allow Sanoma to identify opportunities for bringing value to B2C and B2B customers and for delivering that value at a profit. In this respect, strategy is the way Sanoma defines its business and links together (by mediating human relations) the only two resources that really matter in today’s media economy:

1. 'knowledge' (technologies, specialised expertise and business processes; Sanoma's collective mind that is accumulated over time and packaged in our offerings). But knowledge is not enough. Sanoma's knowledge/competencies are worthless without B2C/B2B customers willing to pay for them.
2. Thus, the other key asset for Sanoma is 'relationships'; our establisched B2C/B2B customer base

Our traditional thinking about value is grounded in the assumptions of an industrial economy. According to this view, Sanoma occupies a position on a value chain. Upstream, suppliers provide inputs. Sanoma then adds value to these inputs, before passing them downstream to the next actor in the chain. Seen from this perspective, strategy is primarily the art of positioning Sanoma in the right place on the value chain -- the right business, the right products and market segments, the right value adding activities.

Today, however, this understanding of value is as outmoded as the old assembly line that it resembles and so is the view of strategy that goes with it. Please, forget Micheal Porter's Value Chain concept. The fluidity-trend (changing mediamarkets, changing roles of relevant actors, changing business models, changing technology) and global competition are opening up new ways of creating value.

Two important challenges:

1. Of course, more opportunities also mean more uncertainty and greater risk. Forecasts based on projections from the past become unreliable. Factors that have always seemed peripheral turn out to be key drivers of change in Sanoma’s key markets. New competitors, from previously unrelated sectors, with radically different business-models, change the rules of our game.
2. Sanoma exists in value networks where the actors have similar metrics, margins and motivations. Moving from one value network to another is very challenging (source: The innovator's Dilemma, Clayton M. Chistensen)

Due to the insight that strategy is no longer a matter of positioning a fixed set of activities along a value chain, Sanoma transforms its strategy from 'adding value' to 'reinventing value'.

• Sanoma's focus of strategic analysis transforms from 'the company' or 'the industry' to 'the value-creating system' itself, within which different actors (suppliers, B2B customers, B2C customers, Sanoma employees and other business partners) work together in a constellation of different business models to co-produce value.
• Sanoma's key strategic task is becoming: the reconfiguration of roles and relationships among this constellation of actors in order to mobilise the creation of value in new forms.
• Sanoma's underlying strategic goal is becoming: creating an ever-improving fit between 'Sanoma's competencies' and 'B2C/B2B customers'.

Sanoma’s value constellation strategy is made possible by a fundamental transformation in the way that value is created. But what is this new logic of value, and what are its strategic implications for Sanoma?

To answer these questions, begin with the simple observation that any product or service is really the result of a complicated set of activities: economic transactions and institutional arrangements among actors (suppliers, B2C customers, B2B customers, Sanoma employees and other business partners). In fact, what we usually think of as products or services (magazines, websites, events) are really frozen activities, concrete manifestations of the relationships among actors in a value-creating system. To emphasise the way all our 'products and services' are grounded in activity, let's call them 'co-produced offerings'.

Second observation: The distinction between physical products and intangible services is breaking down. Does Sanoma offer a product or a service? The answer is neither -- and both. Very few of our 'co-produced offerings' can be clearly defined as one or the other anymore. Increasingly, they involve some complex combination of the two roles.

Today, under the impact of information technology and the resulting globalisation of markets and production, new methods of combining activities into 'co-produced offerings' are producing new opportunities for creating value.

The reconfiguration of activities can offer Sanoma's B2C and B2B customers a qualitatively new kind of value. For example, engaging Sanoma's B2B customers in a self-service activity (for example: our recently launched content portal which enables self-supported uploading of their magazine-ads for our B2B customers) can eliminate traditional constraints of space and time. No longer do our B2B customers have to go to their fysical appointment during business hours. They can act at any time and with the proliferation of digital networks, pretty much anywhere. In our view, the vast majority our B2B customers will flock to Sanoma's online 'communications solutions services' and adapt to them quickly and easily.

This is not merely a change in technology or even in the transaction itself. It is a change in the entire value-creating system. The scene, the script, the roles of the relevant actors are all transforming. For example, a great deal of Sanoma's attention, expertise, and activity is now devoted to the design, building, and maintenance of self-service support tools for our B2B customers (for example: the launch of a content portal for self-supported uploading of ads, or last week's launch of the new B2B site of Sanoma Netherlands).

The new logic of value presents Sanoma with three strategic implications:

1. The goal of Sanoma is not to create value for B2C/B2B customers, but to mobilise B2C/B2C customers to create value for themselves from Sanoma's various offerings. Sanoma does not profit from B2C/B2B customers. Sanoma profits from B2C/B2B customers value-creating activities. The 'company' Sanoma does not really compete with other media companies anymore. Rather, it is our 'offerings' that compete for the time and attention and money of B2C/B2B customers.
2. What is true for individual offerings is also true for entire value-creating systems. As potential offerings become more complex and varied, so do the relationships necessary to produce them. A single company rarely provides everything anymore. Instead, the most attractive offerings involve B2C customers, suppliers and B2B customers, in new combinations, in new roles, in new business models. As a result, Sanoma’s principal strategy task is the reconfiguration of its relationships and business systems.
3. If the key to creating value is 'co-produced offerings that mobilise B2C/B2B customers', then the only true source of competitive advantage is the ability to conceive the entire value-creating system and make it work; the reshuffling of activities among actors so that actor and activity are better matched.

To win, Sanoma must write the script, mobilise and train the relevant players and make the B2C customers and B2B customers the final arbiter of success or failure. To go on winning, Sanoma must create a dialogue with our B2C customers and B2B customers in order to repeat our performance over and over again and keep our co-produced offerings competitive.

• Always keep the following equation in mind: (Perceived value [Sanoma] - Price [Sanoma]) > (Perceive value [alternative] - Price [alternative]). Perceived value is the worth in monetary terms of the benefits our customer receives in exchange for the price it pays for our market offering. Raising of lowering the price of our market offering does not change the value that our offering provides to our customer. The equation conveys that our customer's incentive to purchase an offering of Sanoma must exceed its incentive to buy the next best alternative.

The economics in the post-assembly-line media economy presents Sanoma with a stark choice: either re-configure our business system to take advantage of these trends or be reconfigured by more dynamic competitors.

To exploit these trends, Sanoma takes three steps:

1. Reconsidering the business potential of our chief assets: Sanoma’s knowledge base and Sanoma's B2C/B2B customer base.
2. Repositioning or reinventing our co-produced offerings to create a better fit between Sanoma's competencies and the value creating activities of our B2B/B2C customers.
3. Making new business arrangements and sometimes new social and political alliances to make these offerings feasible and efficient.

As been said, in an economy founded on the new logic of value, only two assets really matter: 'knowledge' and 'relationships' or 'Sanoma's competencies' and 'our customers'.

• Competencies are the technologies, specialised expertise, business processes and techniques; the collective mind of 20.000 experts that Sanoma has accumulated over time and packaged in its offerings. But knowledge alone is not enough. Obviously, Sanoma’s competencies are worthless without customers willing to pay for them.
• Thus the other key asset for Sanoma is its established customer base. Sanoma's relationship with a B2C customer and with a B2B customer is really an access channel to the B2C/B2B customer’s ongoing value-creating activities. Any B2C/B2B customer, whether another business or an individual, uses a wide range of inputs in order to create value. Sanoma’s offerings have value to the degree that B2C/B2B customers can use them as inputs to leverage their own value creation.

Sanoma needs to enlarge its knowledge base continuously. Sanoma must invest in an ever broadening range of knowledge resources and combine ever expanding kinds of knowledge into Sanoma's offerings. What is more, these investments in new knowledge can become so large that Sanoma’s own offerings to its existing B2C/B2B customer base are no longer adequate to recoup its investment. So the new knowledge tends to drive Sanoma into new businesses in search of new relationships with new B2C/B2B customers. And the cycle repeats.

The secret of value creation is building a better and better fit between relationships and knowledge. Currently, Sanoma accountmanagers are trained in our Sales Academy:

1. To master the design and management of interconnected, co-productive offerings.
2. How to mobilize value creation in their B2B customers businesses by reconfiguring roles, relationships, and structures.
3. To perpetually reinventing value in a dialogue between competencies and their B2B customers.

These are the skills that a winning network of Sanoma experts will have to acquire in the post-assembly-line media economy that is now emerging.

David de Boer, Head of B2B Marketing, Sanoma Uitgevers, The Netherlands