Innovation - Servant of Chaos

Innovation, Leadership and Transformation

Case Studies, Conferences, Innovation, The Social Way

Imagine …

You have one great customer … a shoe manufacturer. They create shoes that are worn by the world’s great athletes. I’m talking Michael Jordan. I’m talking Tiger Woods. I’m talking Serena Williams. Cathy Freeman. But there’s more. Many more. It’s like a star-studded cast of top tier athletes that are not just "at the top of their game", they are making history.

And this customer, working with these sporting icons, these star athletes, have transformed the way that we look at sport. They have transformed our own participation.

These days we treat our own fitness as if we were professionals. We spend hundreds, thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars on equipment. If we have the money we can dress the part. Even if we can’t BE the part.

These brands, their ambassadors and their customers have changed the game. They have blurred the line.

Last week – as part of the Hargraves Institute’s Innovation, Leadership and Transformation conference – I delivered a keynote address on Open Innovation: Using Social Media to Build and Maintain Momentum. I shared the approach that we are taking with the SAP Premier Customer Network – to not just think or talk about open innovation, but the concrete steps that we are putting in place to enable and facilitate it.

“Blurring the line” is a fundamental tenet of this approach and what I am increasingly calling The Social Way. Where once organisational performance was achieved through a co-opetition framework, we’re now seeing (and supporting) new models of innovation that closely resemble the social networks that we use at home, at work and in the places in-between.

It’s still early days for the programs that we have in place. But one thing is clear. We need to cling to our stories. And we need to tell them passionately and persuasively. For if we just rely only on the facts and figures, we miss out on the hearts and the minds who drive any innovation within our businesses.

The hard part with any business program is getting to the start line. Many believe that’s where the project ends – but in the social world – and the world of open innovation – the launch is the start of everyone else’s journey. And that is perhaps as it should be.

Ideas, Innovation and the Danger of Networked Group Thinking

Creativity, Innovation, The Social Way

Last year, when Steve Rubel looked into the figures from Compete.com and realised that Facebook is driving more traffic to news portals than Google is, it appeared that we were witnessing the beginning of a trend, not the end of one.

Since that time, there has been a lot of hype and discussion about Facebook’s 500 million members. Some claim it’s a landmark and that Facebook will just continue to swallow the internet whole. In fact, for some people that I know, Facebook IS their entire experience of the world wide web.

This seems to be confirmed by the following graph from Compete.com which shows the traffic trends for Google and Facebook seem to be converging. Or more precisely, Google is dipping down and Facebook is ascending.

Now, I have written about this as a phenomenon before. Social judgement not only happens online – it has been happening in every social interaction since the dawn of time. But increasingly it seems, we are relying on who-we-know to know what we know. This sounds great in theory – smart people filtering, curating and sharing their knowledge and expertise – bringing order to the chaos of abundant information.

But I wonder …

Are we limiting the gene pool of our ideas?

Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From reminds is that innovation, invention – or what he calls “the slow hunch” – require the time and space to collide with other ideas. (HT to Chris Noble for the video.)

What if social networks reach a certain point and then begin to shrink? What if the noise to signal ratio becomes so large that we begin to partition ourselves and our interactions to those of “like mind”. Steven Johnson says “Chance favours the connected mind” – which I love. But what if those ideas swim around in ever shrinking ponds starved of oxygen by the blue-green algae of group think?

I don’t know about you, but this is not the internet I want to play in. It’s not the internet that I want to do business in.

Get out of your internet comfort zone

Years ago when I ran a creative team, I used to regularly drag them away from their desks to visit cultural spaces. We’d go to the Museum of Contemporary Art. We’d catch buses or trains. We’d experience the day-in-the-life of everyone else. I saw it as fuelling their creativity, and it worked.

It worked because it reminded people to be social. To be social in their experience and in the work. It brought a social connection and a context to their creativity. It’s part of what I am calling “The Social Way”.

But now I feel we need to increasingly push ourselves outside of our internet comfort zones. We need to click those links randomly. We need to visit, search and read sites that are outside our narrow focused expertise.

What are we looking for? Our next great idea. I’m hoping to collide with one today.

Word Lens is a Gift for Travellers

Innovation, Web/Tech

Now, I just stumbled across this and think it’s fabulous. Word Lens is an iPhone app that works even without a connection to the internet. It reads signs through the iPhone camera and translates them for you.

Don’t believe me? Take a look for yourself.

Of course, the real question is whether it can translate American. Or Chinglish.

How To Pitch

Innovation, Optimism, Strategy, Web/Tech

Here’s an interesting presentation on how startups should pitch to investors. There’s nothing earth shattering – but the design is great. But perhaps, the most interesting thing about this presentation is how widely it could be used.

Tips on How to Pitch

View more presentations from Project Presentation.

Don’t just think of pitching a new business or startup. Think about your own projects (internal or external). Think about how you need to convince your wife that you should have a shiny new motorbike, or a sports car or a trip to Vegas. Use the same approach with your boss when pitching for a raise.

The same principles apply in all cases. Now just bite the bullet.

The Consumer Expectations of the Business User

Flaneurs, FutureVisions, Innovation, Social Media, Web/Tech

There is a quiet revolution taking place in the enterprise. It’s not something you are going to notice at first. It doesn’t manifest in the kind of disruption that raises the eyebrows of management. It is quiet. Oh so quiet.

This revolution lives in the hearts and minds of the people who we loosely call the “business user”. And the business user is people like you and me. It’s the people who use business systems as part of their daily work. It may be that we use these systems for customer relationship management, timesheets or expenses or it may be that we use them for the heavy duty number crunching of forecasting, accounting, payroll or logistics. Many of us have been using these systems for years.

But at the end of the day, when we log out of these systems, abandon our cubes and head home, we open the door to a whole other world of digital experience.

Grabbing a beer with colleagues at a local bar we use our smartphones to check in on Foursquare. We text friends to let them know where we are, or put out a message on Twitter with the #tweetup hashtag. The more sophisticated will link FourSquare with Twitter and also with Facebook (or Facebook places) to reach different groups of friends with the same message.

Over the next hour there will be tweets, twitpics and Foursquare badges claimed. Photos snapped on our mobile devices will be published to our Posterous blogs or Tumblr sites, pushed to Flickr and tagged on Facebook. We’ll check for restaurant recommendations with our favourite foodies on Twitter, ask @garyvee for a recommendation on a nice bottle of red.

At home over the weekend, we will tag and categorise our pictures, linking people with the places and events of the last week. We will add commentary to our own photos and those of our friends. We will write reviews of restaurants, add tips to locations and “experiences” that we enjoyed and maybe even blog about it all. We are actively engaging, controlling and managing our digital experiences.

But the thing is – we CAN do this. Mobile devices – smartphones, iPads etc all give us access to enterprise grade computing systems framed in a way that links activity, purpose and lifestyle. The fast, powerful, platforms that manage the publishing, distribution and contextualisation of our content vastly outstrip the performance many of us experience in the office. We are increasingly living an on-demand, always-on, connected existence.

What does this look like from the outside? To be honest, it looks like a bunch of people, ignoring each other, sending email on their BlackBerrys or iPhones. But psychologically, you are witnessing a moment of flow. Of connectedness. Or what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi would call “flow” – a state of completely focused motivation. This, of course, is what every employer wants to see in their employees, right?

The problem comes when we take our consumer expectations into the office. Some of our business systems simply do not respond in the way that more “consumer” oriented systems have conditioned us to expect. They take us out of the state of flow. Sometimes this is to do with business rules but often it is simply down to responsiveness. If Facebook can give us an uninterrupted digital experience – keeping us engaged and in the moment – then why can’t our business systems?

As Jakob Nielsen explains, there are three important limits when it comes to response times:

The basic advice regarding response times has been about the same for thirty years [Miller 1968; Card et al. 1991]:

0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result.

1.0 second is about the limit for the user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data.

10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect.

So, when you are thinking about the business systems you use – or that you want others to use – make sure you are delivering to their expectations. After all, you want business users to achieve their objectives. You want to support them in their work. And this means removing those barriers to flow.

Venture Citizenship and the Future of Money

FutureVisions, Innovation

What are young adults thinking about money and value? How can we create new systems of wealth generation and abundance? What does the future hold for banks and other financial institutions in the wake of massive peer to peer exchange?

This interesting piece from Vanessa Miemis draws upon the thinking and ideas of a global community – and scratches the surface on how social or people-powered innovation is impacting currency.

Basing credit on an individual’s potential rather than on their current capacity to repay the debt seems to be the starting point (or one of many). This would see banks and lending institutions acting more in the role of personal venture capitalists. But I wonder, how would this change if it was backed by a government? What would our economy look like if the government invested in innovation by investing in individuals? Would this venture-capital-backed citizenship change our role in society?

Right now, in Australia, individuals at least partly invest in their own future/earning capacity through HECS (higher education contribution scheme). But university is often just provides a basis or platform for individual innovation. It’s those crucial two or three years after university where innovators struggle with bringing their ideas to market.

Perhaps the rise of crowdsourced funding models such as Kickstarter or Fundbreak (closer to home) is being driven by this social demand. But what happens when this demand becomes contagious? How does it scale? Perhaps then we really will need to understand the future of money.

The Future of Money from KS12 on Vimeo.

Featuring (in order of appearance):
Edward Harran, Attention Philanthropist edwardharran.posterous.com
Caroline Woolard, Our Goods ourgoods.org
Alan Rosenblith, Director, The Money Fix themoneyfix.org
Hans Schoenburg, Founder, GiftFlow giftflow.org
Ashni Mohnot, Founder, Enzi enzi.org/index.html
Linus Olsson, Founder, Flattr flattr.com
Jerry Michalski, Founder, Relationship Economy Expedition therexpedition.com
Georg Zoche, Founder, Transnational Republic transnationalrepublic.org
Fernanda Ibarra, Advocate, Metacurrency Project metacurrency.org
Jessica Harris, One Blue Dot Share Networks onebluedot.org
Michel Bauwens, Founder, P2P Foundation p2pfoundation.net
Douglas Rushkoff, Author, Program or be Programmed rushkoff.com

Get Started vs Get Right

Innovation

In an increasingly connected world, putting one’s head above the parapet takes a certain level of commitment. There are, after all, plenty of people willing to take a shot at you, at your idea, at your professionalism or even at your dress sense. And with easy to use platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Posterous and so on, it has never been easier.

But it is precisely because of this connectedness that you must take the risk with your idea, your vision and even your “expertise”. We read the same blog posts, watch the same videos and discuss the same subjects on Twitter – in fact, these social networks have been developed with the express purpose of brining us together. They allow us to flock, to collaborate and to share. It’s no wonder that the SAME new idea appears on opposite sides of the world at the SAME time. After all, our ideas are promiscuous.

But there is always a tension. Should you get started with a new project or should you wait until you get it right? The direction you take depends almost entirely on how you view the concept of risk.

However, there’s another way. What if you start small? Of course, we have an almost pathological addiction to the “big launch” – to make a splash, send out press releases and sing and dance in the streets. But the big launch comes with big risk. Why don’t you try and get your idea down to the smallest, most granular level – and launch it at the end of the week?

Sure you may tread on some toes, but at least you’ll have achieved something.

* I’m sure you’ve gathered that I err on the side of getting started!

Using Social Media to Solve Business Issues

Digital Strategy, Innovation, Social Media

I have been running SocialMediaJobs.com.au as a free site for a couple of years now. The aim was to “connect the connectors” – to bring those with jobs to those who want them. When I started there was only a trickle of roles available, but it has grown quite nicely now – with regular placements coming through.

At first I wondered whether it would be useful to the community – but then I started hearing about the successes – great jobs finding great people, unexpected connections and so on. But there was also an unexpected benefit … I started to gain an insight into the way that companies were thinking around recruitment for social media. It became clear that there was often a mismatch of expectations – and that while personal engagement with social media was often expected by employers, what was required was professional business experience. In short – employers wanted the disciplines of marketing and management, coupled to the creativity and energy of personal social media.

Earlier this year, I spoke with Alex Manchester about my observations and experiences. These, together with input from folks like Euan Semple, Lee Byrant, James Robertson, Ross Dawson, Shane Morris, Philippe Borremans, Lee Hopkins and more have been incorporated into a new report featuring case studies from AEP, Aviva, BT, CBA, Deloitte, ERM, IDEO, ING, NetApp, Scottrade, Telstra, The Coca-Cola Company, Van Marcke Group and Virgin Media.

Published by Melcrum, the report covers a range of topics:

Creating the business case for social media
Developing a social media strategy
Social media technologies (and CMS integration)
Governance, policies and more
Return on investment
The role of social media in the future, including job roles

There is in-depth discussion in each of these areas – particularly useful for those putting together business cases for social media and its activation within your business. The chart below, for example, shows the top three outcomes documented in social media business cases. Interestingly, innovation and idea exchange rank highly (and yet often prove to be the most difficult), followed closely by employee engagement.

The report is now available in hard copy via the Melcrum site and you can download a free executive summary. I believe Alex will also be releasing more extracts on his blog. Don’t forget to subscribe.

Lead Generation, Community, ROI and Other Games of Chance

Conferences, Creativity, Crowdsourcing, Digital Strategy, Flaneurs, Innovation, Social Judgement, Social Media, Storytelling, Strategy

Back in April I had the opportunity to speak at the ConnectNow conference. It was quite a daunting situation as I was the first speaker at the three day event featuring people such as Tara Hunt, Darren Rowse, Brian Solis, Katie Chatfield, Jim Stewart, Debs Shultz, Stephen Johnson, Hau Man Chow, Laurel Papworth and Gary Vaynerchuck, but I saw my role as setting the scene – creating a platform for the following days.

I looked at lead generation, community, ROI, discussing:

What works
How to sustain it
What to expect

Along the way, I pick up on the recurring themes that I write about here on my blog. Topics such as how audiences are changing (the new B2C), the Auchterlonie Effect and why it is the future of your brand, continuous digital strategy, influence and fat value.