Marketing and Innovation

Breakout sessions this morning on Marketing and Innovation. The marketing session was run by Monica Harrington, a former Microsoft and Gates Foundation staffer. She’s donating her time to NetHope and helping to increase awareness of what we’re doing. She gave a good overview of her approach, and has a solid plan for getting things done. One point she mentioned was that we should be working with our internal marketing departments on telling our stories. I made the point that our marketing departments may not know how to tell IT stories, or have the time to focus on this, and that perhaps it was a good opportunity for NetHope to provide some value by giving us extra help. I suggested that perhaps NetHope should be talking directly to our marketing departments. Are there conferences that all our marketing and communications folks attend? It’s great to see effort being put towards this critical area.

On the innovation side, the session was led by Steve Cooper, former CIO at American Red Cross. He was suggesting that we setup an “Innovation Fund” to fund project with specific business value, as opposed to just tech projects. It’s an interesting idea, but I wonder whether NetHope is staffed effectively to add this to the list of projects. Bill said they could walk and chew gum at the same time – I hope so – I’d hate for NetHope to trip while opening a gumball.