Heads Up: Bold plans for radical B2B

As I celebrate the first anniversary of Mark Dancer on Innovating B2B, I ask for your help in charting the course for the year ahead; will you join me in live discussions and community ventures?

Thank you!

With this edition, my newsletter passes its first anniversary. Thank you for subscribing, offering encouragement, and sharing experiences. Your support is fantastic and very much appreciated. Together, we’ve made excellent progress, and, in this Heads Up, I lay out my plans for our second year. I welcome your feedback and suggestions, so please share your comments. I’m off to a fast start and I thank you for coming along for the ride.

My goals

I am passionate about pushing the boundaries of B2B innovation and creating foresight and capabilities for the future of distribution. I am searching for big ideas and how to do them. In my second year, I hope to engage more frequently with B2B innovators at distributors, manufacturers, platforms, and startups, and to work with them to enable progress and expand distribution’s contributions to our society and economy. Mostly, I want to do something important and make a difference, working collaboratively and with resolve.

A tipping point

B2B innovation is accelerating, and the future of distribution is emerging. We are approaching a tipping point, and my work in the coming year will help reveal changes, subtle and seismic, as they arrive. In a recent Deep Dive, I offered this perspective as a way of kicking off the work ahead:

The tipping point I see is not about a winner emerging in the battle between marketplace platforms vs. traditional distributors. Nor is it about suppliers embracing disintermediation to severely diminish or eliminate the role of incumbent distributors. These fights are real and ongoing, with many battles ahead before a war is won, if it ever is. No. The tipping point replaces the long-held principles, strategies, policies, programs, and partnerships of old-school analog distribution with a modern concept and practice of distribution in the digital age. As a discipline, digital-age distribution will be understood and executed by distributors but also manufacturers, platforms, and more. In a way, distribution is experiencing a coming-of-age moment, maturing, and stepping up to operate globally and locally for the betterment of customers, communities, society, and the economy.

My three plans

I am sharpening my focus and launching new work around three plans: thought leadership, content, and community. My thought leadership plan helps guide my investigations. Through content, I find, test, iterate, and offer innovation ideas and methods for achieving change. I hope to provide a place for B2B’s radical thinkers and doers to gather, explore possibilities, and imagine new business models as communities. I will adjust with your suggestions as the year unfolds, but this edition and its plans are intended to help me step off on the right foot, traveling in the right direction.

Thought leadership

Recently, I offered three first principles for B2B innovation based on all of my first-year research and writing. I provided them as the most essential elements to help break down B2B’s hyper-complicated issues and opportunities, for imagining the future of distribution, and to nurture shared values for innovating B2B:

These first principles are a foundation for my investigations, and they help me look for ideas and offer thoughtful analysis and actionable recommendations. In my second year, I will write essays on the meaning and use of first principles to help advance the discipline and practice of B2B innovation.

While the most newsworthy innovations are happening as institutions fight for dominance and survival, I have noticed that change is also dawning at a more organic or, if you will, molecular level. Trends and innovations around the future of work and learning are impacting how individuals create, teams produce, and organizations work. Generational shifts are accelerating change as new workers, professionals, and leaders look for purpose, fulfillment, and the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution. As change happens through individuals, teams, and organizations, long-standing roles, power structures, and partnering arrangements are leading to a metamorphosis from within that will dramatically reshape the future of distribution. So, as I investigate and report on institutional change in my second year, I will also dig deeper into innovation opportunities aligned with enabling and liberating humans at work.

Content

I will continue to publish Quick Take editions every week, offering observations about new ideas, newsworthy events, innovation opportunities, and my take on progress, barriers, successes, and failures.

Deep Dive editions are changing in content and frequency. Every Deep Dive edition will offer more insightful analysis and actionable recommendations, supported by first-person interviews and secondary research. Many will include custom graphics to share data, walk through processes, and explain cause and effect relationships. Some may include links to recorded interviews, live chats, and other conversations. Often, I will preview Deep Dive editions with leaders to review my ideas and collect alternative perspectives. I will publish Deep Dives every four to six weeks instead of weekly to allow time for additional work.

I am adding live chats as a third content element. On those, I will interview innovation experts, startup companies, and distribution practitioners and invite our audience to offer questions and experiences. I will announce coming live chats through Heads Up editions and social media, record our conversations, and document our findings with added ideas, analysis, and solutions in newsletter editions. Some may be hosted by other organizations, vendors, or companies, but our live chats will never be salesy. Live chats are a powerful addition, offered at least monthly.

Combined, my Quick Takes, Deep Dives, and Live Chats will help raise my content to the next level as we discover, understand, and act on big ideas for B2B innovation and the future of distribution.

Community

I am working to create a community to explore radical possibilities. We will invite leaders, founders, experts, and creatives to intimate and open conversations. We’ll ask our guests questions and encourage them to do the same. Our mutual goal is to break down barriers and systems, test and develop ideas, and perhaps, incubate ventures.

I am considering patron relationships. Patrons are individuals and companies that support my work, mission, and methods. Patrons may be owners, leaders, investors, or innovators, but all share a commitment to exploring fundamental change, attacking the root causes that hold back progress, and encouraging cooperation the stakeholders, members, or customers that make up the patron’s community.

Patron relationships are collaborative. I will give visibility for patrons in my newsletters and live chats, but relationships are not pay-to-play, commissioned research, or sponsored content. Patron collaborations are about developing ideas, creating thought leadership, and engaging communities, sometimes on retainer. One goal for patron relationships is to “move the ball” for awareness, understanding, and progress.   

Giant leaps and small steps

Innovation is not easy. Innovation requires foresight, discipline, inspiration, and most of all, hard work. In my pursuit of big ideas, I take encouragement from Peter Theil’s argument that “Every one of today’s most famous ideas was once unknown and unsuspected.” The path to the future is uncertain and there will be many twists and turns. I look for signs of progress in failure and success, mutual initiatives, productive ecosystems, and the striving of visionaries considered ahead of their time, or perhaps, crazy. I shared ideas for both in a recent Deep Dive:

Moonshots and loonshots act on ideas by pursuing exceptional and previously unimagined innovations. They differ in how resources are organized, investments are made, and risks are incurred. As explained in my edition on storytelling, moonshots are expensive, challenging, and risky tasks of enormous importance and impact for societies and, sometimes, all of humankind. Importantly, moonshots are attempted through collective action. Think Kennedy’s cold war mission to go to the moon, in competition with the U.S.S.R., with success memorialized in Neil Armstrong’s famous quotation: “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Loonshots are the province of solo innovators, operating as individuals, teams, startups, labs, and more. Loonshots are enabled by passion and commitment, with a confident, I-don’t-care-what-anyone-says attitude.

Your thoughts?

I am excited about the coming year and my plans for thought leadership, content, and communities. What do you think? Am I on target? Do you see value? Please share your ideas, suggestions, or feedback as comments below or reach me at mark.dancer@n4bi.