At the FORTUNE Business Innovation blog, we’re pleased to announce the winner of our latest “Get Back In the Box” contest promotion. Scott Rubin’s winning entry, which described how the Nintendo brand has become a form of social currency for consumers, was judged as the best overall entry by Douglas Rushkoff.

Douglas explains why Scott is the winner of a free autographed copy of his forthcoming book Get Back In the Box:

“The winner is Scott Rubin, for his astute and multi-faceted appraisal of Nintendo as social currency. Scott’s was the only entry that looked at both how the brand is serving as a social currency for old school Nintendo users, as well how the technology itself has been retooled to allow for social interaction between users while they play.

Honorable mention to nominators of Apple - a company that has certainly demonstrated full knowledge of the power of social currency - and Verizon, a company that is showing a growing understanding of some of the basic principles at play. Some of the others, while examples of interesting and clever marketing schemes, didn’t relate directly the principles of social currency.”

For all the Nintendo fans out there, here’s an extended excerpt from Scott’s winning entry:

“Apple would normally be the obvious choice for the brand with the most social currency value, but I think that today Nintendo is beating them out.

In the past few years Nintendo has been selling official merchandise through stores like Hot Topic. These t-shirts, hats, etc. are all advertisements that say “I played Nintendo back in the day”. People who are in college and high school now are buying this stuff up like crazy. They don’t actually want it to have a conversation with Nintendo about the old school days, they want to use the Nintendo brand to find other like-minded people.

Nowadays kids are growing up never having even seen the original Nintendo or even the Super Nintendo. 10 years ago this was unheard of. If you tell someone who grew up with the original NES that the first RPG you played was Final Fantasy 7 or that the first Mario you played was Mario 64 it blows their minds. They’ll look at you like some strange creature who knows nothing about video games. So they are turning back to their childhood with shirts that say “know your roots” or “classically trained” in order to find the shrinking number of people they can identify with. There was a machine that identified the first ten to 15 years of their lives and now they are using the brand as social currency to connect with others who had the same experience.

But to give Nintendo the extra points they came out with the Nintendo DS. Not only does the Nintendo DS have great games and everything, but you can use the device itself to communicate with other DS users nearby. It uses wireless internet technology to allow people to write and draw small monochrome messages to each other in a chat room, but not over the Internet (yet). They can only communicate within a certain distance of one another. But what you end up seeing is that at any event where there are likely to be many geeks like LAN parties, anime conventions, geek trade shows, etc. There is an immediate network of Nintendo DS users that forms. They find complete strangers with pictochat and then play games against each other… The Nintendo brand is the most effective social currency out there right now.”

Congratulations, Scott!

[image: nahuel31 via flickr]

As “Innovation!” becomes the rallying cry of corporations around the globe, Clint Witchalls of Computing Business (U.K.) takes a closer look at whether British companies have managed to keep up with the global innovation leaders. According to a number of innovation benchmarking studies cited by Clint - such as those conducted by the GEM Consortium and the World Economic Forum - Britain ranks anywhere between 10th and 13th among the nations of the world in terms of innovation. Good, but not great.

The article does a great job of wrapping up current thinking about the state of U.K. innovation, drawing on insights from, among others, London Business School strategy expert Julian Birkinshaw. There’s also a nice goodie at the end of the article - a case study of Shell’s GameChanger initiative, which was conceived as a bottoms-up way of encouraging innovation throughout the company:

“When you work for a company with more than 100,000 employees, getting your bright idea recognised, funded and transformed into an innovation can be an onerous task. Not at Shell. The Anglo-Dutch oil giant has implemented a team called GameChanger to fast-track bright ideas…

GameChanger mimics the way venture capital works. Employees submit a proposal via email to a team of mid-level managers. The proposal is more anecdotal than quantitative; at this stage it is just a high-level idea. GameChanger teams meet weekly to discuss the ideas. The proposals are pre-screened to see if they fit the following set of criteria…

If the proposal passes pre-screening, it is allocated a sponsor whose role is to find a qualified Shell employee to champion the idea. Once a champion has been found, a brief screening panel is convened, comprising the person who submitted the proposal, the champion, and representatives of the GameChanger team. A decision is made at the meeting as to whether the idea should be converted into a formal proposal. If it receives the green light, the formal project proposal will be presented to an extended panel and a decision will be made within two working days. The process usually takes between five days and two months. The seed funding, which can be in the region of £50,000 upwards, is used to develop a full business plan.”

[image: Vintage Shell, via ssomerfeld on Flickr]