Sometimes things are all about timing. The last two days I’ve come across four things that I needed to read and the very moment they came around.

They all have to do with innovation, taking risks and breaking down barriers. Engaging in those and taking a critical look at the tasks I’ve been doing, has given me some of the fire back that has been absent for awhile, so I felt a need to share. Here goes:

The first is a video from the folks at CoPress called A Case for Innovation. Simple, to the point and right on.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/6172232]

The second is a post by Dan Pacheco on how fear, brand addiction and paranoia block innovation. This struck with me because breaking down these and other barriers is going to lead to some really cool stuff.

Just to be clear, I’m not opposed to building and growing existing brands, but in today’s fragmented world I think that “one size fits all” brands have limited appeal. My advice to mature information companies is to think of their brands as “wrappers” for capabilities and expertise. They deliver solutions to customers. But every audience prefers different packaging, so if you use the same brand for everything you end up polluting their potential.

The third is a very clear set of tasks that can be done to create a ecosystem of local knowledge. It comes from Chuck Peters in a post called Focus on Essential New Tasks.

It is a collaborative blueprint for fundamentally changing the way media companies collect content, engage audiences and new voices, disseminate information and work more closely with communities they serve.

We need to create content in the first instance with a new mindset, both those content creators we employ full time, and contracted or freelance community content creators.  All content creators need to have a primary emotional bond with their content and audience, not a product or company.

This content creation needs to take place in a new infrastructure which allows atomization and tagging at the simplest elemental level.  Today we are stuck with locked-down story and advertising publishing systems, and a bewildering array of blogs, tweets and social space entries.

The fourth comes from Neil Perkin and his Only Dead Fish blog. If you’ve never come across him, take the time. It’s worth it.

He recently wrote a post about the power of incomplete ideas, which to me speaks directly to the way innovation often happens.

As Matthew May says in the introduction to his lovely manifesto on the subject (HT to Johnnie Moore for the link): “Conventional wisdom says that to be successful, an idea must be concrete, complete, and certain. But what if that’s wrong? What if the most elegant, most imaginative, most engaging ideas are none of those things?”. Matthew goes on to make a brilliant point about this, that it is the “unusually simple yet thoughtful construction of what is there” that gives the missing piece its surprising power. Rather like Itay Talgam’s ‘Doing By Not Doing’ (if you haven’t seen that talk yet, watch it. It’s worth it).

I am a media junkie and love the idea of forging ahead and breaking down barriers to lead to new success stories in this industry. I take these four items as a call to action.