With the vast majority of election results now in and Election 2006 winding to a final close, Meg Martin of Poynter Online has done a great job of pulling together the best in election night innovation:

“Tuesday’s mid-term election meant a lot of different things for voters in a lot of different places. It was an opportunity for news organizations to utilize new technologies and innovative techniques to tell stories, broad and narrow, to their communities. We were impressed by much of what we saw, so we pulled together elements of the work from all different media, in markets of varying sizes, all across the country. Beyond Election 2006, many of the tools and approaches on display over the past 24 hours hold promise for everyday coverage going forward — up to and including Nov. 4, 2008…”

With that in mind, here are the 12 best innovations of Election 2006:

(1) Personalized Results Tracking;

(2) Citizen reporting;

(3) News at a glance (e.g. MSNBC Dashboard);

(4) Blogging the count;

(5) Equipping the voters;

(6) Streaming the vote;

(7) Continuous content, even during commercial breaks;

(8) The Graphic Traffic;

(9) Chatting the Process;

(10) Listening in;

(11) Mapping it out;

(12) Up-to-the-minute summaries of who won.

[image: Poynter Online]

In the weeks leading up to the FORTUNE Innovation Forum in New York City on November 29-30, the Business Innovation Insider is pleased to present a regular series of thought pieces with innovative thinkers in business and academia. At the FORTUNE Innovation Forum, Business 2.0 editor-at-large Erick Schonfeld will be moderating a panel discussion that includes executives from Yahoo!, Digg.com and Microsoft on How to Bring the Next Big Thing to the Mass Market. In this Business Innovation Insider exclusive, Erick Schonfeld follows up on his Business 2.0 cover feature on disruptive innovation as he describes the primary characteristics of any disruptive technology:

“What all the disruptive companies have in common is that they are throwing orthodoxy out the window and taking a completely new approach to solve unmet consumer or market needs. Some of them are developing new disruptive technologies (like EEStor, which is developing a battery for an electric car that might rival the internal combustion engine), while others are using existing technologies to create disruptive business models (like Zopa, which is using the Internet to create a peer-to-peer banking service that is an eBay for loans). Usually a business is disruptive because it offers an alternative product to the status quo that is either better, cheaper, or more convenient.

The thing that surprised me the most in my reporting for the story is that disruptive technologies that win out in the end usually are not better than what they are competing against-at least not initially. The most successful disruptors creep up on incumbents, addressing markets they are ignoring or siphoning off customers they deem to be too unprofitable. Remember, the PC started out as a hobbyist toy. But every year it became more powerful, until now it rules the world. Today, Web-based word processors, spreadsheets, and calendars are not better than the desktop applications they are trying to replace. But they are more convenient and easier to share-and they tend to be free!

The most disruptive businesses, though, don’t replace existing products. They compete against non-consumption by opening up new markets that were never before possible. Think of the airplane, the cell phone, or the Internet. Sure, some industries might get trampled by these new technologies - but only if those industries are not giving consumers what they really want. If you think about it, disruption is just another name for the age-old economic concept of creative destruction.”

[top image: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]