The 25 C’s of Innovation by Cesar Malacon
It is well known that most people would rather receive information in beautifully wrapped packages that help them ‘contain’ the message in a simpler way by connecting the info with a tool that allows them to access it when needed. Such is the value of a reliable acronym, reference or letter bundle that offers a welcome bridge over what might otherwise feel like a sea of unwieldy or unpackaged information. Maybe we were taught to do this in primary school or maybe the method is really useful to retain data more easily. The fact is that acronyms and letter bundles came to stay in the teaching/learning process, and we have many of them rolling in our minds since long ago. Maybe you are thinking in the famous 4 P’s of marketing right now! One of the strongest examples of a letter bundle is precisely the 4 P’s of Marketing that E J McCarthy popularized in 1960 for the marketing mix, and which has been widely accepted by academics and practitioners around the world ever since. The 4 P’s of Marketing were later changed to 4 C’s because Bob Lauterborn, professor of advertising at the University of North Carolina, thought the C was a better way to think about a marketing mindset. He dared to propose his new approach to the marketing mix, but stayed within the letter packages information-delivery method. Which is my point for this occasion. 4 P’s of Marketing, 4 C’s of Marketing, 7 P’s of Service Marketing, 5 S’s of Kaizen in Continuous Improvement, 5 C’s of Business Credit or any discipline you might be interested in may have a letter bundle like these mentioned. Who knows? Maybe we really think we are more intelligent every time we memorize a set of letters to describe a concept. Just to keep the tradition, I want to point out that Innovation has its letters bundle too. And it’s actually the addition of all the numbers above. Easier