I recently finished reading Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer. I highly recommend the book to anyone who has an interest in innovation, creativity or technology. While the book is full of amazing facts and ideas, there is one idea that stuck with me as being highly relevant to our industry: Lehrer explained that innovation tends to happen at the “edges” of a discipline. This means that it is not Gutenberg the printer who invented movable type, but rather the wine connoisseur in him that saw the opportunity for a new way to use a wine press. I cannot think of an industry that is more suited than printing to interact on the “edges” of other disciplines. We are one medium of many in the advertising space, and increasingly each piece has to be better understood by the rest. The question then becomes which of the media will be most innovative by borrowing ideas from others?
In this issue we learn a bit about mobile marketing. This style of marketing is riding on the coattails of very high mobile adoption rates. So while we are worrying about users switching from print to computer screen, the exponential growth in mobile is giving rise to a market in which consumers will skip the computer screen altogether. It does not matter that you are not an expert in mobile; in fact being a novice may give you a creativity advantage according to Lehrer.
This month’s lead article is about another section of our industry that is comprised of a melting pot of experts — packaging. Diana Brown takes on trends in packaging through the lens of sustainability. She discusses areas of process, technological and environmental sustainability. Here we see another great print innovation, the NFC chip that you may be familiar with from tapping your credit card to pay. Just this past April, Wired magazine partnered with Lexus to create an NFC enabled advertisement, which Diana talks about in her article. Who is the innovator there? Is it Lexus? Is it the publication? Or is it perhaps the printer? It could be that in the same way that wine making turned printing on its head in the days of Gutenberg, the NFC chip in advertising came to be as the result of an innovative way of interpreting a coffee purchase at Tim Hortons.