Love, RIPPLE100

[Re-posted from August 2009]

I was sitting across Clayton Christensen in his Harvard couch a few weeks ago. Talking innovation with the dean of innovation. Remarkably the thread wasn’t about all the things Clay had figured out. Instead, gray areas. Places literally – where the world’s foremost expert on innovation was still trying to figure it out.

Innovation: In Washington, where he sought to inject it into health care reform (wonder why nobody’s calling it health care innovation?). In India, where he sought to apply it in bottom of pyramid ventures; and in the Philippines, where analogous bottoms, I suggested, could be turned upside down. In Singapore, an entire country and modern day miracle built on innovation that yet finds itself hungry for more.

I entered that meeting a skeptic and left not needing google to urge me deeper into Clay’s work. This giant of a man (he’s 6′9), fervent Mormon, Harvard and Oxford trained Clayton Christensen had managed to put in words, in one english sentence, all the code we’d been programming in Ripple100.

“An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill.” (Italics are mine, bold are Clay’s). The point is bold: Disruption via Democratization.

That’s precisely what we’re doing at Ripple100: Giving Entire New Populations Access. To Marketing. Where it persists as the rarefied realm (or “intuition”, as Clay calls it) of ad agencies, PR firms, design shops and other highly skilled professionals, Ripple100 is making marketing Do-It-Yourself. Indeed, when we say micromarketing we don’t just mean what you can do with our app (hyper-focused and frequent marketing campaigns) – micromarketing is also an ode to who can do it: the small guy, the small business, the small nonprofit, the local politician.

This is our holy grail at Ripple100: technology – and a place – where anyone can ripple (i.e., create, manage, and grow marketing campaigns about) anything anytime for any market anywhere in the world.

To succeed, we are obliterating the still-too prohibitive costs of marketing circa 2010 – costs in terms of money, time, skills to do marketing.

We’re making it as simple as this: if you can read and write, you can ripple.

But leveling the marketing playing field, opening it to new segments of users – that’s just the start. Who gets to play re-draws how it gets played. There will be winners and losers, and in our cross-hairs is what we believe will be the next relic of the industrial age: advertising. Who gets to do marketing determines how – how authentic, inclusive, constructive and mutually rewarding we can re-make marketing to be. All those things advertising consistently fails to do.

So, thanks Clay. You zeroed us in on the key lever: who. For a guy who was never into gurus, I now count myself a big fan and hopeful practitioner of Clayton Innovation. Disruption via democratization. Opening up rarefied places so more people can get there, and thrive in it. In Ripple100, that place is marketing. That place is now open to you.