On November 6 at the Yale School of Management, a conference is being held on “Finding the Upside in the Downturn: The Changing Role of Marketing”.
The conference will feature keynote speeches from Michael Polk, President, Unilever Americas; John Hayes, Chief Marketing Officer, American Express Company; Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO, Denuo, Publicis Groupe; Steven Sturm, Group Vice President, Toyota Motor North America, Inc. The topics they will explore include how their companies are rethinking their marketing, innovation, pricing, product, and communications strategies; their use of new media and new technologies; changes in media consumption and brand building tools; and consumer behavior challenges and opportunities in both developed and developing countries.
Watch this space for an update after the conference.
Olav Sorenson has just joined Yale SOM as a professor of organizational behavior. His background is in examining why firms cluster. This has been a research topic of my own interest in the past and an interesting puzzle.
Sorenson looks at the issue of industry clusters from the perspective of where an entrepreneur should choose to start a firm. By positioning a new firm near existing relationships, capital, resource, and social networks, it explains why this would be a rational place to start. As research has repeatedly shown, clustering of this type leads to a tight concentration of industry that may decrease eventual production rates over time.
In the venture capital industry, investment almost always flows to entrepreneurs that the VC already knows. Existing relationships have the power to determine the potential for funding. As introductions are made to the VC community, cultural differences have the potential to ruin funding, as it is the cultural barriers an entrepreneur must overcome to build those relationships that could lead to funding from the VC community.
In markets where VC investment is required, VC relationships are what becomes influential in industry development.
Over the next 10 years, the growth of relationships in the VC community in relation to emerging clusters will determine what new ventures get backed for an opportunity to change market dynamics.
Discussion is emerging on the idea of a for-profit social enterprise ecosystem. In a recent Yale School of Management interview, two innovative CEOs of social enterprises are questioned on social goals and profit motives.
An increasing factor that matters to employees is being part of a business with a social mission. Businesses with a social mission and the ability to generate revenue to fund it will ultimately reach higher success rates with that goal.
A call is made for policy makers to look at policy that acts as a disincentive to sustainability and socially-positive activity by businesses. Current policy causes behavior that increases difficulty of consumers to make social minded decisions that, if resolved, would benefit certain organizations with sustainability in mind as well.
The question begging to be asked was “Should non-profits be concerned that for-profit social enterprises will compete with them?” Simply, a for-profit’s ability to generate revenue and deliver a superior product will be resilient. Too many non-profits are fragile and at risk, they will continue to hope the big donors come to dinner while burning the midnight oil with marketing dollars and watching for-profit social enterprises flourish.
The paradigm is shifting on social enterprises and sustainability.
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