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What makes a smart brand? What ingredients make for a successful brand? What is the future of marketing? These are some of the questions that were asked and answered at the recently concluded Paul Writer Futurist CMO Conference in Gurgaon, India, an event for marketing professionals in which many senior and mid-level experts from various well-known companies and brands in India came together to discuss the future of their profession.

The logical, deductive approach to problem solving that we are all taught is not always the best for trying to create breakthrough ideas. In fact it can be positively counter-productive. You often need to be "illogical", non-linear, and put the cart before the horse (that is, have the idea before you know why it's valuable) to help get things rolling.

After a crazy couple of weeks in the consumer electronics/smartphone/computer/telecom mega-industry (it's really all one now), another bombshell arrived yesterday with the news that Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO and is taking on role of chairman of the board. In reality, it probably means he will be in an advising capacity not unlike what he's probably been doing for the last year while on medical leave. But still, a shock to the system.

An increasing array of smart devices, applications, and consumer demand for video and multimedia rich content presents a new growth opportunity for wireless operators. This opportunity is forcing operators to rapidly increase the footprint, performance and bandwidth of their existing networks. While the opportunity is huge, the investments to upgrade to 4G infrastructure is pretty significant; thereby leading them to look for efficient and cost effective solutions.

One big piece of this investment is the radio access network (RAN), which has only recently started to catchup with the evolution of the rest of the network components. Recent advancements in radio architecture are now providing operators with increased flexibility and scalability to meet the growing needs of their business. Some of these major advancements, include:

• Multimode and multi-standard base stations
• Antenna integrated radio (AIR) systems -- compact, tower-mounted solutions for 3G and 4G
• New compact base stations -- picocells, microcells and femtocells
• Active antenna systems with heterogeneous network management
• Distributed, flexible approaches to radio access networks that include baseband pooling
• Cloud infrastructure 

Reverse innovation stories in emerging markets highlight the untapped potential of innovating operating and business practices in developed markets.

The more I read about “reverse innovation” and the opportunity this creative method of rethinking products and services has opened up for the developed world, the more I see how important operating and business processes are. What’s interesting is that in the telecom industry the best examples (and the most successful ones) are coming out of emerging economies. This shouldn’t be a surprise as innovation in the emerging world has been an outcome of the prevailing business pressures that left little option but to change conventional thinking.