The Innovative YouTube Video Worth 50 Million Views, Plus Yours

Innovation is often a seemingly surprising thing. It comes in an amazing variety of formats and forms. It penetrates the masses, sometimes taking decades, sometimes spreading faster than Russel Crowe can send a tweet. It can help save lives, help empower an army or simply make you smile. A wonderful consequence of innovation is that there is always a lesson to be learned from the successes and failures.

50 Million YouTube Viewers Can’t Be Wrong

We’ve discussed on the TopCoder Blog in the past that not all innovations are of the Eureka! variety. In fact, many, if not the majority in the current technological and social environment, are repurposed ideas – taking an invention from one field and applying it to a near or non-related field. There are also “fused” ideas, which is actively combining what were two disparate ideas and forging a new invention or innovation from multiple existing ideas. Visit these links for more on the topics of idea hunting and idea fusing.

The innovative, and extraordinarily popular video is both an example of repurposing and fusing of ideas. So what is it?

• It is not an original work, yet it is wildly original and inventive

• It took the idea of this popular video – and made it even more entertaining (Fans of TOTO – you’re going to want to click that link)

• It exploded in popularity after a few celebrity tweets and an invite from Ellen DeGeneres

Enjoy.

What are some of the lessons from this innovative gem?

• Minimalism in design and presentation is still very alive, and preferred by many. While OK Go was busy filming this creatively wild video, Walk Off the Earth (the band above) put together this effort and is beating OK Go’s latest effort out by about 5:1 when it comes to views.

• Something does not have to be yours for you to create value from it, with it. Whether it’s an open API platform or literally someone else’s work (as is the case here), value creation is possible in more ways than ever before.

• Even in the extraordinarily busy sea of ideas, tweets, pics, vids and other data forms, outliers and things that bring extreme value will surface and in today’s climate, the exceptional will be elevated faster than ever before.

Today’s innovation landscape is more competitive than ever. But if you bring the outstanding to market, there is no limit to how much success and how quickly it can be achieved. So take your swings.

Walk the Earth was recently rewarded with their own record deal. For those interested, enjoy Gotye’s video, they are the band who actually wrote the song.

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