Sylvain Cottong

strategybuilders.eu

Economist by education, I now have 17 years of experience in business consulting, Internet consulting, innovation management, marketing & communication, IT, UX & service design, technology and trendwatching. Restless in my drive for discovering new knowledge and broadening my understanding on how successful things work and on how to use & implement new management models within changing markets & rising complexity, I continue to be involved in different communities and discussions around the world on the future of business, technology, government, urban & social life.

Interview in Computerworld Romania

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Posted on 2012-01-01

Back in September 2011, I made a presentation at the Eastern Europe Mobile Monday summit in Bucharest. Following that presentation, I got interviewed by Computer World Romania in their November 2011 issue.

Here is a transcript of the Interview in English:

Computerworld Romania: We are facing now may be one of the most disruptive moments both in the technologies (cloud, virtualization…) and in the business models in the advertising world. How do social media and its penetration in our business and private lives impact the marketing and the promotions of products and services?

Sylvain...

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Mobile apps as touchpoints in a service system

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Posted on 2012-01-01

In September 2011 I had the pleasure to be invited by my good friend and augmented citizen Dan Romescu (@dromescu), a world-travelling mobile tech guru, to the Eastern-European Mobile Monday summit in Bucharest, Romania.

The event, which gathered several hundred highly talented mobile developers and small companies mainly from Eastern Europe was sponsored bya series of device manufacturers, Telco operators & other mobile services companies. (They know why they do that….they need the developer’s talents to create content for monetizing their networks & devices..)

I saw a lot of very interesting developments, apps, trends & foresight in this whole area that looks like to be one of the goldmines of the future...

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Social Intranets, Gamification & Enterprise 2.0

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Posted on 2011-12-19

Gamification will be everywhere soon.

The reason is that gamification (the use of game mechanics such as leaderboards, badges, achievements…etc in non game applications) is deeply social and makes many routine tasks or less enjoyable tasks more fun as it fosters interactions and positive competition with your friends, colleagues & peers.

The open web as well enterprise 2.0 applications get ever more social moving from connecting people to information to connecting people to people (see for example “Stop talking about social”) and gamification will gradually be integrated into every type of interaction, be it personal, private, public or professional.

Gamification is already widely integrated in consumer applications (for an overview of gamification concepts and some examples see...

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On Forecasting, Backcasting & Design Thinking

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Posted on 2011-12-04

For several hundred years and especially since the industrial revolution, humanity including business & politics lived with the firm assumption of unlimited resources & somehow controllable linear predictability of future states based on current activity.

During that time, strategic planning was done mainly via forecasting, meaning predicting in a linear and controllable way a future outcome based on current activity & investment.

As we all know, within a short time, and amplified during the last 20 years our felt reality has become dominated by limited resources and many sustainability issues as well as by a globalized world that has become uncertain because of much higher complexity as a result of the many and ever increasing sophisticated & interconnected systems we create and live in.

The result is that linear predictions have become almost impossible and complexity combined with limited resources makes forecasting much more difficult as...

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Customer journey mapping vs. job mapping

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Posted on 2011-02-02

Customer journey maps are considered as a central tool in service design. Diagrams that illustrate the steps customers go through in engaging with a company or public service, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination.

Customer’s typically follow a similar mental and formal process when engaging with a company. A typical framework is:

Awareness -> Research -> Engaging -> Buying -> Delivery -> Use -> Support -> Sharing

First people get aware of a particular service or product that has the potential to help them to get a certain job done, then they do some research on the different types of offerings and competitors, after which they start engaging with the supplier of their choice, make the acquisition decision, get delivered, use the product or service, get support from the supplier if needed and share their experiences with their peers.

This process is...

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Social business & service design

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Posted on 2011-02-02

In my last blogpost “Towards a new model of management & society” (which was a bit to long for a blogpost I must admit) I described the changing paradigm and structures in business and society as a reaction to ever more demanding and better informed customers & citizens, multi-directional real time networking via social media, a constantly changing world that faces important economic, social and environmental challenges combined with people centered technological innovation.

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Towards a new model of management and society

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Posted on 2011-02-02

The technological advances and social transformations of the last two decades considerably impact on how business, society and government interact, connect and organize themselves.

Major activities of modern life like socializing, management, marketing & advertising, education, public services and urban development have undergone major changes and at the end of 2010 it seems like we are at the beginning of a second wave of development and acceleration in these areas.

Advertsing & marketing

Consumers are increasingly in control of how they view, interact with and filter advertising in a multichannel world as they shift their attention away from linear mass broadcast media like TV and adopt ad-skipping, sharing and rating tools. Consumers have become immune to mass advertising and even to Internet banners and email newsletters and are tired and bored of intrusions of non contextual, unidirectional and one-to-many advertising...

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Beyond GDP (and its microeconomic equivalent)

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Posted on 2011-01-21

In my last blogpost Service design within the business model canvas I raised the question of how the business model canvas, service design and service-dominant logic approaches can be incorporated into performance management, balanced scorecards and strategy maps, by identifying the Key Performance Indicators of successful companies and public services within changing markets. Although not being able to provide a lot of tangible answers right now, I want to add some thoughts.

In this recent contribution Tim Brown from IDEO also asks the question about metrics:

“How should we assess a company’s permission to innovate? Could we create a brand innovation...

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