Welcome to OiL 1.01

Open Innovation Lab 1.01, 20-21 May 2008, Lisbon

MEDIACI’s very first Open Innovation Lab (OiL 1.01) took place during the World Media Economics Conference in Lisbon. The objective for the OiLers was: 

Defining the “Key Drivers for European Media Businesses, 2020”

We captured the whole happening (with lots of notes, illustrations, pix, vids…) and had a lot of fun. With great pleasure we enjoyed MEDIACI’s fabulous kick-off! Thanks go to all who worked that hard to get it at that stage. Up to the next level!

So, enjoy our blog and feel free to add your comment!
=;\

 

PS. Apologises for the pictures, videos and illustrations that are still under construction… some imminent matters…

Launch!

20/05
Robert Picard, Antti Paasio and Peter Mechels —the Founding Fathers of MEDIACI- present MEDIACI’s very first Open Innovation Lab of a series, OiL 1.01.

OiL 1.01 is hosted within the World Media Economics Conference in Lisbon, thanks to the gentile help of the Catholic University of Portugal, Obercom Observatory for the Media, ISCTE business school, RESTART school for creativity and new technologies, JIBS business school, TSE business school, etc., as well as the everlasting support of some fantastic individuals from all over Europe. 1000x thanks to you all, guys!

The OiL blend

20/05 
So, a fine selection was made…

Some experienced, groundbreaking media entrepreneurs from various backgrounds were called —all of them earned their reputation in the development of the digital media industry during the last 15 years. These guys were assembled in Lisbon to encounter a distillation of renowned academics in the media (management) field related to economics, entrepreneurship, innovation, education and media policies. This cocktail simply required to be served stirred and a little bit shaken…

Reception

20/05 – 12:00
Tuesday, the 20th of May (Whole afternoon…)

Except for the people who were already on the World Media Economics Conference in Lisbon (most of our academic recruits), we are all introduced to each other in the lobby and bar of the Lisbon Marriott. Most of us have never met before (Antti and Peter are of course the linking hosts in this play…).

To capture these very moments of change and innovation, Sushannah Raemaekers starts to film short video interviews with all the participants. So we all get involved in a firework of some nasty questions concerning our belief in this open innovation initiative with this intriguing name Mediaci and of course the OiL event itself. Later on, some Lisbon film school people join us as well and the cameras do their work (for the videos: come and see somewhere in the near future…) as they are taught to.

The official part starts at the Casa do Alentejo, a gorgeous Moresque palace in the very heart of Lisbon. GPS stuff is of course not accurate enough to locate this thing, so local guides were really required (Thanks for the prefect guidance of António… our man in Lisbon). Casa do Alentejo, Rua do Chão de Feria, 1100 Lisboa, that’s the address.

Key Note

20/05 – 19:00
At one particular and intriguing part of this moorish palace, we are all welcomed by a small introduction from Antti Paasio and a very surprising keynote speech by Robert Picard.

As chairman of the the World Media Economics Conference, he really makes the bridge to our ambitions with Mediaci and OiL. His keynote illustrated  a “Media Economics overview: Europe vs. World”, showing us the “weaks” & “leaks” of the market.

Besides the intriguing trials of a small orchestra that tries to do some rehearsals (for their act during the gala dinner later on) Robert really manages to give us an overview of the latest happenings in the media industry, from an economical point of view. He actually states some encouraging ambitions for Mediaci: Conquer the waves!

Gala Dinner

20/05 – 20:30
Around 20:30, all participants of the conference enter as well to have a Gala Dinner with our crowd, so we are introduced to people of The Emma; the European Media Management (Education) Association that bundles researchers and academics on the media management field. It would be great to work together on the foresight field…

As the night calls, some make a quick visit to Lisbon’s Barrio Alto…

Wake-up

21/05 – 08:30
Dear Marriott (and her swimming pool) is left behind. For some of us, that night was a tough one, once again.

But duty calls this time: Let’s Perform! So we taxi to the ISCTE business school to dig into our OiL 1.01 objectives: Defining the “Key Drivers for European Media Businesses, 2020”.

The OberCom research lab hosts our event in a beautiful environment. A quite intriguing element to this location is the fact that the landing strip of the Lisbon airport is only a few hundred meters away… So every 10 to 15 minutes, a huge Boeing or Airbus flies right over the university campus at a seemingly touchable distance… Standing outside and experiencing this spectacle makes you show a very deep respect for anyone, working in there.

However, in our meeting room, the sound of these wobbly airplanes is not disturbing for an instant. It seems like the building itself provides us that deep mystic grunting sound, as if some machine (HAL?) holds us hostage in this labyrinth (check the pictures). But in general, that sound actually provides a nice, comfortable kind of stress… It makes you focus on the here & now, carrying our discussions even that little bit further. Great!

ISCTE / OberCom business school, Av.ª das Forças Armadas, 1649-026 Lisboa

OiL kicknote

21/05 – 09:00
Opening / Peter Mechels welcomes everybody to the gathering and declares the Open Innovation Lab as really-really open.

With a quick overview of the program, he shows us the track pad for that day (Some slick design, don’t you think? Please be aware that the images are for very strict internal, educational, academic use only. Thanks go to Kubrik and his 2001, A space Odyssey, we love you!) and introduces us to our soul-mate Antti Paasio, who made this very first OiL show really happen.

Media businesses 2020?

21/05 – 09:20
Antti Paasio fires us his power speech “Media businesses 2020?” by showing the Media market research results between 2000-2006. He succeeds in his plan and makes some entrepreneurs among our crowd shuffle their chairs and raise sneaky questions right-away. The atmosphere just got set. Some work has to be done!

Antti explains to us that media is not a fast growth industry in the traditional way.

Productivity of media companies grew/grows surprisingly slowly (Fin 2001-2006) – the gap between the annual value added per employee (118,2 thousand €) and the wage and other expenses of an employee was/is not that large. Certainly not, when compared to the rather small amount of money that media companies need to finance their investments, R&D, etc…

So the ROI in European media companies is around 10 %.

When media companies are “established”, they grow quickly (around 20 %), but the growth rate reduces also quite rapidly. After five years, the growth rate reduces substantially and after 20 years traditional media companies have very little growth and are not innovative any longer.

Antti pushed our eyes on the Growth of advertising: The UK generates ½ of the internet advertising in its whole. Portugal, on the other hand generates almost none from internet advertising – The differences in the systems of advertising in different countries show us to be careful when comparing numbers from all over Europe. 

It is indeed difficult to understand what is actually going on. For example: Portuguese companies might get huge discounts (up to 70 %) on advertising (by simple exchanges of operations within a media holding). Or if companies advertise for example with Google, then the statistics plainly disappear, since Google won’t tell the numbers. 

As long as we do not change our thinking about the internet, in a way that this internet carries an extreme and immense importance for all us, in anything we do… then the importance will not change, and the possibility/risk of a media industry boom in the future remains.

Antti provides us the examples in Croatia and Romania, we can notice that relative growth rates are huge but the absolute numbers are much smaller. 

He concludes that traditional Media is a far too narrow definition of the industry and M & A activity is not sufficiently looked at. Only turbulent times are ahead! We have to take into account that the Creative industry carries 3-8 % of the GDP, the Copyright industry as well 3-8 % of the GDP and the Cultural creative industry 6 % of the GDP of Europe.

Everybody of our mixed crowd agrees on the fact that the media industry is a messy field with very variable definitions. Therefore we decide that we will define the definition(s) since one of the basic MEDIACI ambitions is to generate foresight about the European media market. To fulfill this ambition, market research needs to be synchronised at once.

Morning session: “Media trends from various angles”

21/05 – 09:45
Session: “Media trends from various angles” 

To start thinking about the drivers of the media trends, we split up into 4 groups. By balancing the groups (each guided by a severe captain) throughout a fine mix of cultures, experiences, backgrounds, ambitions, cults and standings, makes us focus on 4 very different outcomes, in form and in function, in content as well as in packaging.

Peter Mechels kick-starts two exercises by guiding the crowd through various angles of media innovations, disruptive and not.

He provides an example (the Web trend map from InformationArchitects, Tokyo) of how an excellent trend map could look like. He pointed at some of the Drivers of the media industry, located in the (enlarged) legend of the map…

Exercise: “Mapping the Drivers” & “Designing the Changes”

21/05 – 10:00
After Peter’s introduction to the exercise, he announces the captains of the four different groups and distributes the group lists. First people look a little confused, but when the captains take effective charge and find their group members, things start to happen. There is some intensive brainstorming and speed dating (mind that they only vaguely know each other…) going on at the same time.

Exercise: Mapping the Drivers and Designing the Changes

• Drivers of media (business) innovation 
• Disruptive business innovations: A redefinition 

• Indication of the changes in models, organisations, markets, contents, technologies, finances
• Extrapolation to entrepreneurial views (Large companies vs. SMEs) 

We take a pit-stop for coffee & cigarettes (thanks to Obercom). People gather into groups again and start their brain storm discussions. As the time passes by, the talking gets louder and louder. The tension and noise we produce during the very last fifteen minutes of the exercise, make even the woowing sound of the almost-touchable airbusses out there completely disappear. The groups get ready for their presentations; it’s performance time!

Exercise results…

21/05 - 12:00 — Presentations of the exercises (4 groups)

Presentation 1/4: Context is king, not content

21/05 - 12:00
Group 4 — The group of Cpt. Staneker (Cor Boonstra, Jorge Vieira, Simon Scales, Thomas Staneker and Timo E. Toivonen) brings us a fine PowerPoint-show to enjoy (on a gorgeous Mac Air!).

The main ideas of their presentation are:

• There is an overall driver for everything we care about: The need for the media industry to establish a B2B relation to individual customers, a one-to-one customer relation.
• There has been a massive change in users’ behavior and in the way you produce and distribute content.
• Drivers can be fun but also fear can be a driver.
• As mentioned before, we need a clear definition of media industry. It is also difficult to give generic answers that suit everybody.

Disruptive innovations: 

• portability of content
• all devices can play content (any content suits every device), at any time
• the world becomes flat (everything becomes flat)
• everybody can produce and develop, share/meditate content
• new technology makes it difficult to protect your assets
• key elements for change
• identifying and removing roadblocks (copyrights, patents etc)

Big changes: 

• content is there
• relevance is important
• context is king, not content 

Presentation 2/4: Technology as key driver of media trends (?)

21/05 - 12:15
Group 2 — Cpt. Heinz-Werner Nienstedt’s group contains the respectable members: António Saraiva, Frank Van Oirschot, Gustavo Cardoso and Pasi Malinen.

After a few arm-wrestling sessions in this small assembly, they decide to stick to the idea that Technology is the key driver of media trends. So they dive into various technological innovations and describe the changes from that point of view.

Frank shows us his transformation of the discussed list of drivers:

• Location-based services (LBS); you can see where you are, which is a big thing in gaming 
• Trend: IP everywhere anytime; 4G in Korea
• Peer-to-peer networks, social networks create more trust
• Matching: who and where you are; this helps develop contents, games etc.

Audiences:

• Classic media is less important for young generations, people under 25 years old use more time in internet, mobile – not with tv and newspapers.
• Social networks are the most important, youngest generations use most time in those. Young people use their money in their mobile phones etc. and although middle-aged and older people have more money they don’t use it in media.

Advertising:

• Integration of content and context, relevance of the content

Interfaces:

• Intelligent/interacting interfaces
• There are 3 main screens in your life: mobile, tv, and computer. Although any content can go in any device, you prefer to, for example, watch a football game on a big screen.

Formats: 

• User-generated content (user-generated context?)
• Open journalism, audience interaction (everything is interaction: playing a game, posted opinions, ratings, every click you make is an expression of an opinion on something).

Networking

• Cross-media; any content can go in any device 3 
• Split high-end and mass market (specialty tv etc.)
• Individualization
• Long tail
• Fragmentation; advertising is less important, there are more tailor-made services and new consumers are willing to pay for this -> direct payment models and more advanced payment models

Business models:

• Flat fee services: things are available but also affordable to everybody (for example in Japan people use a lot more mobile services etc. because of this affordability)
• Middle man (who is taking the risk) is getting out of the system in many ways (publishers etc.), technology replaces them -> changes in the value chain (when technology substitutes the middle man a part of the value chain is eliminated).
• All kinds of people are giving services, you just pay a service fee 
• Disintermediation
• Franchising, licensing

Organisations:

• Giants? Big companies in the new media sector: Yahoo, Google – their market share is still small but there is a lot of innovativeness.
• Networking: A lot of people look for trusted partners around the world
• Making formats, licensing and franchising are a very successful business

Presentation 3/4: Flower Cloud Power!

21/05 - 12:30
Group 3 — Paul Tyler, Petri Uusitalo, Giuliano Mussati, René Lansink

After we experienced some technical problems with the computers —since Paul tried to infect and crash every computer in the room with his virus-carrying USB-key- we finally started the show again…

The third group, whose Captain Mr. Tyler was, takes a different approach to the exercises. Paul explains to us that their starting point is the growing common concern of the planet and therefore the group discusses this from advertisers’ and users’ point of view.

Can-do’s and Can-do-nothings

There are two audience groups that react differently on the concern of the state of the world and self: The Can-do’s and Can-do-nothings. The Can-do-nothings recognize these concerns but feel there is nothing they can do and the Can-do’s are those people who think there is something they can do. So this affects their behavior – the use of media, the need on media and the view on media. The Can-do users will have a driven sense of empowerment; they can do something for the general good through the use of media. 

Trust

Users will have two types of trust; in tools and in self (can use the tools correctly). The Can-do-nothings will have the greatest sense of being left out, while the Can-do’s try to become activists. There is a shift from Movements into Moments; there are high peaks of activities and this activeness brings sense of awareness. They give meaning through showcasing the activities of the users and from the created awareness it will lead to the group of Can-do-nothings. 

User-Concerned advertisers

Advertisers are going to join the point of concern and will present themselves as concerned as the users, becoming almost persons themselves. Advertisers try to activate and help the users to act and make the process effortless and help with the trust aspect (make trust more easily to attain). 

Individualism

Paul states that his group also discussed the needs of individuals. The need to feel secure has stayed the same as well as the need to belong, and (for sure) the need to control our relations with others (although it has become more selective). 

The need to do and activate, the need for affirmation or to be recognized, the need to express and the need to belong are recognized growing (for example: youngsters want to be celebrities). This need to express ourselves to people we don’t know is enabled by the Media. Wow.

Presentation 4/4: Mapping Media Trends

21/05 - 12:45
Group 1 — Charles Brown’s group (Gert Verschueren, Teijo Pellinen, Charles Brown, Manuel Sequeira) provides us again another view, with of course similar components. Charles explains us there various angles to the changes. From clear subjects, they mapped the trends:

Political:

• Changing relationship between public and private media,
• Privacy and data protection, privacy vs. usefulness,
• Copyright? -it has a role but not a clear one

Economic:

• Limits to advertising growth
• Internet advertising highly concentrated overtaking other areas
• Fragmentation
• Alternatives : targeting advertising, sponsorship, product placement, non-traditional advertising (sidestepping media) (gas station next to a supermarket etc.)
• Disintermediation of the traditional advertising agencies: what happens to that part of the industry?
• Fee/free tension

Socio-cultural:

• Disposable time
• Leisure economy
• What is generation Y doing
• Migration and mobility
• Fragmenting audiences
• Security
• Religion/secularization
• New media nations (India, China; Chinese communist party regulates Chinese media, which is important thing to watch)
• Ageing populations (West)
• Young populations in the emerging economies
• Role of new media companies
• Rise of the prosumer
• People want quality and convenience what it comes to content and also time shifting, space shifting, utility and disaggregating dangers.

Technology:

• Capacity might be a temporary problem; bottle neck in Britain
• Intelligent networks: discovery, customization, semantics
• Location aware technologies
• New interfaces and output devices: 3D, passive interfaces, voice interaction
• Hardware and software issues disappearing
• Tools

Disruptive innovation and planning change:

• Hard to plan disruption, they just emerge
• An ad-hoc and iterative process
• A move towards networked organisational structures: choreography and cash, creative clouds, crowd sourcing? (newspapers already pressing the right buttons with the audience), mass-amateurisation scenarios?
• Public and private funding still both important
• The nature of financing models? more fragmented and complicated
• Impact of territorial boundaries falling down? 
• Intellectual property (IP ownership) remains important, but models for monetising it change (how?).
• Role of talent? Does everyone have a novel inside them?

Comparative view of the presentations

21/05 – 13:00
TAG CLOUDS of the exercise results will be added in the near future… 

Note: Comparison will be made with earlier provided input from students and colleagues of members of the Mediaci network of today…

Lunch

21/05 - 12:45
Lunch — During lunch time, we decide to speed things up. The ultimate goal is converting the current presentations and discussions to ambitions and objectives that can be carried by the whole group. We have to keep in mind that we’re looking to define the Key Drivers of media businesses in Europe, 2020, otherwise this Lab has no use… 

Since the diversity of drivers in a constantly changing market and a lack of research results (or accuracy in research, due to missing parameters, conventions, standards and even data…), we will never be capable to gain any guidelines or even mutual strength in the present and future media field (especially in Europe).

Food for thought…

 

Flexibility meets performance

21/05 – 13:59
So, we change the program slightly.

We stick to the second session (Advertising 2011, 2016, 2021; Global vs. EU scenarios, Petri Uusitalo, Cor Boonstra), but take a short cut at that point to get right into the fourth session (Key drivers of EU media businesses) by integrating an introduction to the business model changes (and challenges) of the media industry (by Pasi Malinen).

(Former session 3, “The Next-Web fall-out: Impact of the Web principles to real-life” will be taken along to the very next OiL, 1.02… The current idea is to get to the “Mapping of the Next-Web fall-out” in a way that we could have an outlook on things like: Manufacturing 2.0 – Pattern intelligence – Peak shaving – Collective curation – Collaborative altruism – Creative commons – Gridless consumption… etc. You can call it an “Inductive innovation foresight” if you want. So no worries about René Lansink’s announced  view on the “World Wild/Wise Web?”, we’ll get there… Come and see us next time.)

Afternoon session

21/05 - 14:00
In the afternoon, we start with a compiled second session:

“Advertising 2011, 2016, 2021; Global vs. EU scenarios”, related to a sneak preview of some “Key drivers of EU media businesses”; an overview of the happenings from the business school perspective.

Advertising trends towards 2020

21/05 - 14:00
Advertising 2011, 2016, 2020; Global vs. EU scenarios by Petri Uusitalo

Petri provides us with some Advertising models trends: As he states: From 1960’s to 1990’s media companies collected most of the money (in the traditional model in advertising). 

As we all currently experience, there are many possible value chains (so, there is no one standard value chain): Tools of production have become cheaper and available to everyone (The advertising budget has fallen from several hundreds of thousands euros to five to ten thousand euros). 

Next to this all, there are new technical things to help skip all the advertising you don’t want to see; you can for example replace advertisements on the internet with art pics. Conclusion: Audiences are getting more demanding and rebelling against the advertising.

• Value chain example 1: Creating pull with a big budget multichannel campaign: 

Corporate advertiser is the initiator of the campaign and there are many paid specialist companies heavily involved in the creation and production of the campaign -> long and expensive value chain. Using traditional mass media and events to generate pull to online media.

An advertising agency generated an imaginary actress in the internet (Scarlet campaign for the new LCD tv of LG) and used the generated interest to forward the message. In the end LG of course revealed that Scarlet was actually imaginary and the name of their new product.

• Value chain example 2: Non-professional small budget self-advertisement: 

A cheap freelance design and advertising production is used – there is no need for professional players in the value chain. In his example, Youtube is used as the only media generating pull towards the authors’ website. Mind the “We think” mentality: People gather on the web to create new ideas.

• Value chain example 3: Audience/community driven and company sponsored campaign:

The value chain is turned around 180 degrees. An idea by an individual created via a website that is then offered as a media to sponsor-advertisers. So there is no role for advertising/media establishment. Petri shows Freerice.com: Everybody can play the game (easy questions), the project got company sponsors who donate rice for every right answer and the money goes to UN’s WFP (nonprofit business model). 

Petri envisions the Future as a possible Community centric model –The trust in advertising has been replaced by trust in individuals, so the audience = community. There are self-publishing syndication platforms, with a consumers’ revenue-sharing model for advertising. Advertising and media agencies etc. have evolved from skill-centric organizations to audience-relation centric organizations selling ability to generate conversation between brands and their audience and also among the audiences (see pictures)

So the changes have already started, it’s only a matter of speed. 

Reflection (SME market)

21/05 - 14:15
As reflection, Cor Boonstra states that even in B2B advertising (for the same kind of A-brands), the sky is the limit. All clients of course expect to use the current web techniques to bring their message, sell their product. Challenges are: organisational structure of ad agencies, market knowledge, skills/experiences of involved people (at client side as well as at the agency side), changing revenue models, changing role of the agency (in between the brand and its consumer community), changing relation between the brand and its consumers: the real brand owners.

Media business model challenges

21/05 - 14:30
Key drivers of EU media businesses; media business model challenges by Pasi Malinen

Pasi takes us along his views: From traditional to new ways of organizing things, from technology development to customer focus, from value chains to value networks, from large corporation ideology to entrepreneurial ideology and networking. The End-user focus in current R&D&T

Latest trend is mainly based on the Long Tail principles: Fragmented audiences, communities are not just developing technologies but doing things for the end-user.

A business model: How to organize the business so that we will make money?
No one size fits all, it all depends on the context. 
Various “new” business models as we can list them today:

• The subscription business model
• Razor and blades/bait and hook business model (cheap razor, expensive blades)
• The pyramid scheme business model
• The multi-level marketing business model
• The network effects business model: “everybody has one”
• The cutting out the middle men business model: DELL was one of the first, sold computers directly to the end customers
• The auction business model
• The online auction business model
• The bricks and clicks business model: you sell something on-line as well as have a shop
• The loyalty business model
• The collective business model: collecting different kind of companies under the same roof
• The industrialisation of services business model 
• The servitisation of products business model: if you sell products, you try to bundle it with services
• The low-cost carrier business model: RyanAir: 1 $ per flight, gambling on-board (revenues from gambling)
• The online content business model
• The freemium business model
• The premium business model
• The direct sales business model
• The professional open source business model
• The various distribution channels business model
• Internet-based business models: Brokerage, advertising, infomediary, merchant, manufacturer (direct), affiliate, community, subscription, utility…

 

Pasi’s conclusions:

• The one who has the customers/end-users make the money (YouTube)
• Open innovation ideology: How to get the customers in the development process (it’s hard because they have a completely different mindset)
• Communities and content are important (peer-to-peer etc.)
• No “one size fits all”
• Do not necessarily follow traditional business models, use multiple models
• Be flexible, seek dynamic business models
• Don’t stick to the old business model, try to find new ones, use various revenue earning logics

Our challenges… (the warm-up lap)

We open a discussion related to the presentations of Petri and Pasi… and do a warm-up lap for the final discussion (looking for the key drivers…).

During this warm-up, before the final coffee break, we focus on the following:

• Are the captains of this industry (old school media enterprises) ready to change their thinking? 
• Google’s shareholder value is huge, but not the turnover cash flows. Expected cash flows are what count in this case. 
• Media is selling two things: The size of the audiences and the attention of the audience
• We debate spamming: Is there a business model whose purpose is to familiarize the customer with the product or do people really buy the products based on spam and they make the money out of it? Paul Tyler states that companies use spamming, because you make a lot of money out of it. In the BBC documentary it turned out that people who should know better (doctors, vets, managers of big companies) really pay for these products advertised in spam e-mails. Ethics of the spamming?
• Everybody wants to have their 15 minutes of fame! 
• Do people get fed up with viral marketing? When you know where the information is coming, you trust it. It depends on how interestingly you are, using the advertising medium (people get bored with boring tv-adverts and also with boring viral marketing, but not with the interesting ones). (BTW: Viral elements of advertising: (In Dutch: “Geil, goor and grappig”, translated in:) Horny, rude and funny…)
• Anyhow, we’re experiencing a Big shift in advertising: 65-70 % of the budget shifted to online marketing at some big companies out there.

The Quest for the Key Drivers

21/05 - 15:15
The grand final. After a coffee & cigarettes pit-stop, we’re ready to dig into the great final discussion: 

Defining (in one group) the Key drivers of EU media businesses by a mapping exercise on the OiL 1.01 discussion topics.

This subject awoke of course lively discussion. We were fed by the various points of view of our crowd (academics and entrepreneurs at first, but as well: educators, creators, researchers, business developers, sales & marketing people, brand & product designers, architects, etc…), an intriguing ambition (Open Innovation for European media businesses), a provocative agenda (OiL 1.01 on the Key Drivers for European Media Businesses, 2020) and a gentle, but nicely stressed ambiance provided by that deep mystic grunting sound of the ISCTE campus; our proper HAL, holding us hostage in this labyrinth.

In that intriguing atmosphere, we guide the dialogue to the following:

Antti Paasio leads the discussion, Peter Mechels moderates the dialogue and René Lansink fils up the white boards with the OiL 1.01 conclusions, ambitions, objectives, wishes and commitments…

Defending today is more risky than adapting.

• We need to see how people consume media, how it develops and in which speed the behavior of advertisers change. Where and when consumers consume? We want to know media diets. 

• Danger: satisfying our own needs vs. answering to what is actually happening. Danger to try to develop a key that will fit all locks vs. dependence on the situation. 
• Organisations and organisation is perceived differently in Europe and in Asia (centralized power in Asia, people obey). How does power actually work? 

• Where does the insight come from? New big thing: Product technography, getting onto the streets vs. “innovating” in our offices. When a tsunami comes, you have two ways to act: put technological appliance on the ground and see what the numbers say or listen to what the dogs say (howl before the tsunami); probably we should listen to the dogs. We have to define the sensors before the drivers. 

Remarks

So. We need to be discussing: Where the society is going? We don’t need to be talking about media at all. Although media changes society. Don’t tell us we have to change. Tell us the next step: the direction. What are the trends in the society? And the structure? Map trajectories on different directions: Are people coming more enabled or empowered? More trusting or untrusting? Foresight – not forecast

Different means and different speed are used for different target groups. Where we focus our attention? New business models? When you have the big picture, then the work starts. We need to create scenarios. 

• Trendspotting -> Projection to -> Trendsetting
• You need to develop a tool to test ideas: framework, methodology. 

Next steps:

Next OiL: Autumn 2008, where, when, who? MIPTV Cannes in October? PICNIC Amsterdam in September? Need to think of cycles of participation, even a “flying circus” containing thinktank people…

Conclusion:

Focus on new business models? Focus on the DESIGN OF THE MEDIA LANDSCAPE!
We need a DYNAMIC MODEL, a GENERIC TOOL to sense the emphasis of the past, the present and the future happenings of the media business (including Europe). We need to steer and guide research; turn this knowledge into foresight, initiate training & education programs (workshops like OiL, summer schools etc), and facilitate entrepreneurs in their business developments…

Consideration is made of funding possibilities like Tempus 4 projects? A broad Think tank with EU policy people? An EMMA link? Open networking all over Europe… that’s for sure KEY.