The network. This is perhaps the most valuable edge available to most products. If you make it fun and easy (and profitable) to talk about a product, it's likely that people will. Derek Sivers runs CD Baby, an e-commerce site that sells CDs from more than 59,000 independent musicians. Those musicians send their fans to the site to buy their CDs, and while the fans are there, of course, they discover thousands of other artists. Sivers also writes very funny customer-service emails. When a company tells you that your CD order was placed on a satin pillow before packing, you tell a friend. Or 10.

Packaging. Yes, of course, the package is part of the product, and the free prize can very easily be the package itself. Packaging is not a gimmick when it works. Juice boxes, for example, would not be worth seeking out if it weren't for the innovative packaging--the juice is the same. The package did more than call attention to the product--it changed the product.

You can go over the top by adding more packaging (like Rhino Records and its amazing boxed sets), or you can take an industry where the packaging is a hindrance and strip it away. Audio content provider Audible will sell only the digitized voice for your favorite book on tape, not the cassette or the box--the company's product has zero packaging.

Technology. Moore's Law says that every 18 months, the power of computer chips you can buy for a dollar doubles. This opens two kinds of opportunity. The first is at the cutting edge. Xbox and PlayStation pack supercomputer power into video-game machines. If you could add a supercomputer to your product or service, what would it do? The second approach is to take advantage of the cheap part of the curve. Yesterday's technology is always (much) cheaper. The latest innovation: The $11 digital camera. If computer chips were a penny, how would you use them?

Design aesthetic. Design is the single highest-leverage investment you can make. A well-designed product is usually cheaper to make and service than what you're doing now. It will also improve sales because people notice it and talk about it. Not only the user interface but also the entire user experience is now dictated by design. (See "Masters of Design," page 61.) Of all the edges I know, embracing amazing design is the easiest, the fastest, and the one with the most assured return on investment. We've only touched the tip of the iceberg of what great design can do for a product, a service, a form, even an organization.

A 9-year-old can do edgecraft. While the edges always change, the process never does:

1. Find a product or service that's completely unrelated to your industry.
2. Figure out who's winning by being remarkable.
3. Discover what edge they went to.
4. Do that.

Crest figured out how to make money with remarkably cheap electric toothbrushes. What if companies such as Gillette or Henckels or Oster or Braun or Playtex or Toro or Sony decided to go to the same edge in their industry?

Don't copy the specific tactics. Figure out how you can get to the same edge but in a different way. If a restaurant captured the attention of its audience by offering an all-you-can-eat chili-pepper night, that doesn't mean your hardware store should start selling chili peppers. Instead, realize that people are attracted to excess. You can offer the contractors in town all the bricks they can carry to their truck for $9. And post the name of the guy who carried the most on a sign by the cash register. (And why not list the guy who carried the least while you're at it?)

It's all about marketing now. The organizations that win will be the ones that realize that all they do is create things worth talking about. The future belongs to people who can invent, implement, and sell the ideas--the free prizes--that become remarkable products. It sounds daunting, but it's not. Just start. Start now. Fail often. Enjoy the ride. Make something happen.

Angela Kapp, Estee Lauder

A moment in the Pittsburgh airport in the fall of 1995 gave Kapp her soft innovation. The then-executive director for special projects and technology for Clinique saw stores she actually wanted to shop in, of all things. This wasn't about bad food and high prices. This was the Gap, Speedo, foot traffic, and shoppers with money to spend. With a prestige brand such as Clinique, location is everything, and she took the edge that worked for other specialty stores and applied it explicitly to her business.

She pitched her boss on opening a freestanding Clinique airport store, a first for the brand. He was skeptical, but within a couple of weeks, he had a flight with a stopover in Pittsburgh and was able to see what Kapp had described. With his buy-in, it was easy for management to say yes. The Clinique store in Pittsburgh is one of the top-volume locations for the company in North America.