The Creating Blue Oceans blog consistently provides illuminating case studies of companies that are leveraging the power of Blue Ocean Strategy. Recently, Gabor George Burt highlighted the blue ocean thinking at Seattle-based Brown Paper Tickets:

“We were recently tipped to the exploits of Brown Paper Tickets which seems poised to take the event ticketing and distribution world by storm. Brown Paper Tickets enables even the smallest of merchants to become an event producer and ticket distributor. All one needs to do is plug in the event information and then direct people to the Brown Paper Tickets website to purchase a ticket. So if you are having a charity luncheon for ten people, or a concert for ten-thousand, Brown Paper Tickets can handle the entire ticketing and distribution process.”

Brown Paper Tickets has also been profiled by Springwise, which explained how the company is fast becoming a “consumer- and vendor-friendly alternative to Ticketmaster.” For example, Brown Paper Tickets offers buyers low ticketing fees ($0.99 per ticket plus 2.5% of the sale price), thereby enabling individuals, small businesses and nonprofit organizations to sell tickets to their events quickly and cheaply.

Here’s the latest for international wine enthusiasts: a new $100 million Frank Gehry-designed hotel in the medieval village of Elciego. The hotel is located right smack in the middle of Spain’s Rioja wine region and is attached to a local winery dating back to 1858, meaning that guests will have the run of the local vineyard - as well as access to an ancient wine cellar and a wine tasting corner and the opportunity to partake of “wine therapy” massages.

If the building looks familiar, it should - it’s from the same celebrity architect who designed Spain’s Bilbao museum. According to Alejandro Aznar Sainz, the head of the Marques de Riscal winery, the goal was to build a “21st-century chateau” that fused the best elements of modern innovation and Old World charm. The bigger picture, of course, is that the new Frank Gehry-designed hotel will likely provide a boost to the Spanish tourism industry and stoke demand for locally-produced Spanish wines.

[image: Hotel Marques De Riscal]

Sarah Ellison of the Wall Street Journal recently profiled the changes afoot at the R&D unit of Good Housekeeping magazine:

“The research arm of Good Housekeeping magazine has been testing products for more than a century and granting advertisers who pass muster its famous seal of approval for almost as long. In its early days, the magazine’s “experiment station” was designed to help new brides become better housekeepers.

The Hearst Corp. magazine has evolved since then, but it is its testing lab — now called the Good Houskeeping Research Institute — that has undergone the biggest facelift of late as the magazine pushes to maintain its position among traditional women’s titles while fending off arriviste like Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple and O, the Oprah Magazine.”

Anyway, the Good Housekeeping Research Institute has a new 20,000-square foot facility in midtown Manhattan, equipped with soundproof rooms, a climatology chamber, and multiple test kitchens and labs. The institute also has the full backing of Rosemary Ellis, the magazine’s new editor-in-chief. Already, there are plans to make the institute’s R&D services more prominent, such as by using product testing from the institute as the backdrop for regular segments on “Good Morning America” and “Today.” The magazine is also giving the testing lab a broader mandate to do original research and to “sniff out” faulty products and potential consumer frauds.

[image: Researchers at Good Housekeeping]

In coordination with the upcoming FORTUNE Innovation Forum in New York City, futurethink and the American Management Association are co-sponsoring a special innovation webinar on Wednesday, October 11 at 12:00 noon ET. The two hosts of the webinar will be Lisa Bodell, founder and CEO of futurethink, and Heather Schultz, Senior VP of Program Acquisition and Management at the American Management Association. (Heather is also the former President and COO of Tom Peters Company). Anyway, if you’re already signed up for the FORTUNE Innovation Forum, you have probably already received an e-mail invitation to the webinar. If not, here are the details:

“Innovation. Everybody’s talking about it. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find an organization or CEO who wouldn’t say it’s a top strategic priority. So if innovation is such an obvious answer to today’s business challenges, why is it still so elusive? The truth is there are significant challenges to overcome in order to make innovation part of an organization’s everyday life and DNA.

True innovation requires shifting how businesses treat innovation in order to make it a normal and repeatable business process; moving from the mystical and intangible to the measurable and manageable; and developing a clear framework for understanding innovation and a clear path for driving results. Attend our free web event and learn about the four capabilities organizations need to become truly innovative - ideas, strategy, process and climate. Uncover an effective approach to drive innovation, discover real-life examples of other innovators, and learn how to jumpstart innovation in your organization.”

To sign up for the webinar, visit the official site for the FORTUNE Innovation Forum and then scroll down the page to the “Free Innovation Webinar” link.