Built to Thrive – exploring the new business landscape

Two more examples of crowdsourcing approaches.

I’ve spoken quite a bit about innovation related communities and ecologies over the last months. One component that is needed to make innovations successful, is the ability to try and predict the future. Some predictions are described as scenarios and others can come from communities where the whole world participate in submitting predictions. The community, What the future holds plays to your need to leave a legacy where people in the future will see that you were able to predict the future.

Nostradamical: predict, publish, play “Essentially Nostradamical is a fun approach to a serious topic: The ability of ‘the crowd’ to predict events with better overall success than ‘the individual’.” The focus is on getting social communities to share information about the future. They are also working on a prediction engine that uses the data from the community to intelligently make predictions.

I find this particularly interesting as most of our clients would benefit from this approach when collecting complaints, recommendations, ideas, compliments, etc from their clients, staff, etc. We are entering an era where the classical MIS (management information system) approach is just not going to cut it. Real-time information is needed as crowds share ideas, change behaviours and shift markets. Integrating financial information from your bank, with tax information from the local authority, vehicle information from your car, mobile behavior from your cellphone, E-mail information from your E-mail provider, social information from your Facebook and Linkedin accounts… And, once integrated, you should be able to have recommendations made as to when to phone, where to drive, and what to do next for optimal performance. Is this taking it too far?

Here is another example, and something more practical…
We are embarking on a rethink of our brand, something that happens periodically. LogoTournament is a crowdsource based community where designers from all over the world can design logo’s for companies. It will cost you anything from about $250 to $5000 depending on the level of response required. So, why would you do this? The old way was to give your favorite agency a detailed brief, let them come up with something, and then you select an item. This is costly and everytime you want to change something it costs you money.

To crowdsource your design you need to provide the same kind of brief, and in some cases more detailed. You set the price tag and off you go. Designers from all over the world then submit their designs in pursuit of the relatively small fee for the design. Ranking systems are used to determine the kind of designs you like and don’t like. All of this happens interactively with a design community obsessed with making a name for themselves.

Dear planet, it’s beena while since my last confession. Actually, I have never made a confession as the motivation has never been as strong as now…

I have not posted anything on this blog for last two months as I’m grappling with some reasoning about certain aspects of our modern existence. I’ve been brought up in one way (and rebelled), transformed into the world of commerce in another way (and was forced to adopt or die), and pushed into rethinking all of what was there before.

Operating in a commercial world where I spend some of my time teaching innovation (and related topics) at one of the local business schools, got me thinking that we are living in the most intense times of change. Ye sure, “change” – move on. But, there are many things that we are forced to think about that is not how we were brought up. All the great inventions of our era and the past 100 years or so, are all under serious scrutiny.

I have to confess that I find it difficult to shape an outline for my next academic paper (that is expected of me as a part-academic) and still feel comfortable that I’m promoting something that will be good for humankind going forward. It is incredibly hard to separate the “logic” of global warming, pollution, human rights issues, and the general destruction of human behaviour WITH the clean thoughts of recycling, eating organic food, clean energy usage, etc.

My clients are large corporates that are trapped, like all of us, in a cycle of demand and production where it is virtually impossible to reverse the wrong doing of age in one generation. Yet, it is expected that all of the human race needs to change its view on how it lives its daily life.

I am confronted with the emotions of employing a number of people to earn an income and feed their families, while the only means of income is based on the application of skills by using toxic (to this planet) based products. How do we reconcile our behaviours during the radical transformation periods?

I have to confess that I’m ill equipped to fully guide my children on the dangers of how they should behave to preserve their offspring’s future. The world I come from is long gone, and I’m only in my 40’s…

Check out Ecogenetic.com

Neuroleadership as a field is emerging and poised as an important component of driving leadership development and organizational change. There is a conundrum though in that the Social Sciences and Neuro Sciences are developed separately. Some integration is taking place as the NeuroLeadership community tries to develop some of the connections.

In the “Customer Centric” world, practitioners are trying to make sense of the role that social networking technologies play and sometime forget about the individual. Consider crowdsourcing for a moment – what is the NeuroLeadership versus NeuroFollowing’s role in making group decisions? I’ve been reasoning that the role of the individual gets amplified in crowds that need direction. In one of my previous posts My take on the “The Myth of Crowdsourcing”, is that the individual has needs, aspirations, etc that are sometimes morphed into the identity of the group. But, more often than not, the individual plays a role more important than what is expected.

Looking at newish communities like The Social Customer, The Customer Collective, Social Media Today, etc you will find an intense focus on researchers trying to understand the “social” aspects and not the “neuro” aspects of human behavior. This recent research reveals once more that certain key communities are emerging as leading social platforms for business users. So, where is the holy grail?

Will we be able to design a new customerized approach where the characteristics of individual, by using NeuroLeadership approaches, and characteristics of the group, Socially oriented approaches, can be combined in a new view for value creation?

Is the NeuroLeadership crowd, just another very relevant crowd, trying to make sense of our complex physical make-up in a world where theorists and practitioners are scrambling for relevance?

We have been trying to find different ways to depict the history of innovation (this is a draft version and work-in-progress). The posted does not show any “time bands” of change nor does it provide any detail as to the inventor. The idea is to represent some of the major changes from the industrial revolution onwards that changed our lives.

“Crowds don’t innovate–individuals do.” writes Dan Woods. Obviously, I think that Dan missed the point a bit as to what crowdsourcing really is!

Let’s look at the basics again:
“A crowd is a group of people. The crowd may have a common purpose or set of emotions, such as at a political rally, at a sports event, or during looting, or simply be made up of many people going about their business in a busy area (eg shopping).”

Crowds are groups of individuals with different backgrounds, preferences, opinions, skills, etc. What makes a crowd is when just one of these preferences coincide with preferences of others.

“Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call.” “Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions.”

The key is “sourcing” in crowdsourcing, it refers to the concept of getting groups of people access to potentially solve a problem. It is not that the “crowd” can solve anything; it is that an individual that is already influenced by being part of a movement or community now has access to a platform where the most appropriate solution will be accepted.
In the era of market segmentation we focused on segmenting markets based on behavior, gender, preferences, etc and then tried to solve problems for the segment in a generic way. Concepts like mass customization pushed concept of allowing a “market” to change some of the variances in the product/service based on individual preferences. Customerization is when the marketing messages and produced product or service are customized simultaneously based on individual preferences.

So, my take on crowdsourcing is; it is a platform for customerization where both the supply-side and demand-side of the value network in the economic setting participate in the extraction of value. Value in this case refers to economic and other forms of value for example reputation building, education, societal causes.

There is a relationship between crowds and tribes. Tribes is defined as “the term to refer to societies organized largely on the basis of kinship”. Crowds are formed based on common properties, and in most cases when crowds are formed inside companies it happens due to kinship; hence the relationship with tribes.

Let’s look at an example:
If you want to crowdsource ideas to develop a new business idea, you would need to firstly have access to a crowd. This crowd could be your immediate social network, or some other community where the individuals in the crowd have similar interests (and possibly only one common interest). You would need to present a “request for ideas” to the crowd where individuals will then decide (individually) if it is worth their while to participate. If the incentive is for immediate gain; where you pay money for great ideas, or if the incentive is long term; where you pay once the idea has been implemented will be different between various parties. As the crowdsourced ideas get submitted, the crowd will assist in determining if these ideas can contribute to the problem that’s being solved. This rating and ranking approach is now well adopted by eBay, Digg, etc where crowds express their views by voting en mass.

The ability to communicate and integrate ideas in society will continue to fascinate the human race. My take is that crowdsourcing related activity is an evolutionary phenomena on the way to have a more efficiently integrated human-technology decision making landscape. We are influenced by our peers, networks, friends, etc which are all crowds and we use technology to remove the inefficiencies of this influence.

Steve Jobs has changed “the world as we know it” in many different ways. Check out his first appearance back on stage, making an appeal to all. Steve Jobs returns to the stage.

This is in 2005 when Steve gave his Stanford Commencement Address.

Sidney was an incredible man with many strong views on the world. I’ve included two short video extracts from his presentation at our Realities of Innovation Conference held in 2004. In the first video he presents his view on “vision”. The second video is about his approach to passion; he often spoke about “passion and purpose”.

Idea ecologies are exploding by using open innovation based principles. Until recently it was very difficult to tell your suppliers (the many retail and other suppliers that fill our everyday life with goods and services) what you need from them. Now with crowdsourcing and idea ecologies you can become part of these organizations and participate in swarm based innovation behaviour. In my previous post about these ecologies I discussed some examples. This is an update with more organizations joining the “crowdsourcing of ideas” phenomena.

eBay, Amazon and others pioneered and popularized the concept of rating and reviewing of deals in the world of commerce. In this digital world we trade with ideas and intellectual assets.

Check the Ubuntu community’s ability to elicit ideas and have the best ones implemented by an open source community.

Innocentive is one of the first successful idea ecologies that was founded by Eli Lily. Ideas are captured and solved by the crowds of people interested in making an impact. Communities are brought together to solve problems and prizes are set in monetary and other soft measures.

Idea Bounty is a community that elicits ideas and then crowdsource the best ideas as a solution to the problem (ideas). A bounty is set where the prize money is promoted as one of the biggest draw cards of the crowd. In this community you have creatives and clients. Clients set bounties and creatives respond to these with great and useful ideas. You can also be rewarded if your friends have winning ideas; they call it “Share the Love”. I like this statement; “Idea Bounty was started by a guy who saw the light and a guy who was frantically waving a torch.”.

Idea Connection is a great community with lots of information on the concept of crowdsourcing. With the vision statement: “To give businesses access to the world’s most creative and innovative minds, who work collaboratively to solve problems and develop innovations.” they have a mountain to climb as the world is jumping on the ecology wave. They follow the same approach; ideas are needed to solve problems, ideas are captured and rewarded.

Netflix Prize wants to achieve: “The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences.” In the world of media and especially in a disruptive world of on-line media, the viewer uses ratings extensively. This community tries to incentivise crowd participation for rewards.

IDEAnet has a noble cause. This is their purpose: “The IDEAnet is a global collaboration of individuals and institutions that provide medical services and humanitarian relief. The mission of IDEAnet is to foster collaborative efforts to use distributed learning and volunteer telemedicine to address health disparities and foster effective, sustainable health services.” It is mostly designed around Communities of Practice based concepts where ideas and discussed and developed for benefit to the community.

Connect + Develop from P&G is a great open based innovation community that brings together many parties in making innovation work. This is a comment from Bruce Brown: “It’s our version of open innovation: the practice of accessing externally developed intellectual property in your own business and allowing your internally developed assets and know-how to be used by others.” This is a great summary of many parts of the crowdsourcing based innovation concepts: “Today, open innovation at P&G works both ways — inbound and outbound — and encompasses everything from trademarks to packaging, marketing models to engineering, and business services to design. It’s so much more than technology.” P&G has Innocentive, NineSigma, Yet2, and yourEncore as partners making their innovation initiatives some of the most successful today.

Socialtext is a social community platform where many components of what’s needed to construct complete collaboration communities are built. Their value statement: “Socialtext was founded on the vision that technologies emerging in the consumer web offered far better social dynamics than any enterprise software. The opportunity we saw was to create a new social context for organizations and the people who make up those organizations.”

Social computing as a platform for social networks are now in the corporate space. For those that believe that the old paradigm, and those set in their ways, is going to get you to compete with the highly integrated and well connected generation has some else coming. This is the era of social based ecological activity. Consumers are educated that their voices will be heard and that the eras gone by, where CRM and other half-baked attempts to solving customer problems, are gone. There is an explosion of social communities, check these entries; 50 Niche Social Media Communities and top social networks for entrepreneurs. And, yet senior people shun social networks. We are in a paradigm of socialization.

Does innovation require a different outcome during these times? Will a lean approach make me more successful? Do we have to do things differently than before? Would people adopt the approaches quicker than before? There are a number of questions that are left partially unanswered as academics and practitioners struggle to find easy answers for their individual settings.

Discovery, Invention, Innovation, Improvement, Creativity; throwing these in the organizational “pot” creates more confusion than solving problems. When [man] saw fire for the first time, was it a discovery? Imagine the surprise and excitement when the uneducated and uninformed caveman felt the heat from the fire for the first time. But, how do I keep this thing going? How was it created? Got asked before the long road to innovation to turn the discovery into something that is more controllable. The invention of making fire came much later.

Innovation during lean times is about the realization; that most of what we’ve learnt during the previous knowledge cycle since the beginning of the industrial revolution, is now under threat. We are working on two innovation re-think projects called “Built to Thrive”, that focuses on understanding business innovation as an eco-system activity; and “Social Based Innovation”, that focuses on the approaches to follow to re-invent yourself.

Participative Customer:
Historically we found that many of the time-locked concepts for example “client centricity”, “best practices”, “talent management” and “scorecard based measures” to mention a few; create common and copied views of how the world works. This imitation without understanding deeply why you need it has destroyed more companies than any other. The great pioneers of our time do not copy; they engage and immerse themselves deeply in the activity of their business and then redesign their future’s appropriately. The industrial era’s mindset is still fresh in the minds of managers and they find it difficult to shift [paradigm] to an era where the value creation activities are now socially influenced.

Let’s take one such example called ”client centricity”. Listening to your customers is a sure way to get into trouble; they have entirely different approaches, mental mindsets, and outcomes in mind compared to you and your business. The future is about crowdsourcing, crowdspirit, co-design, co-production and immersion. You do not want to give your favorite mobile provider or bank the exact requirements of what they need to make for you in the future. You want to be surprised and enlightened. This requires a much more networked and involved approach to understanding the issues and problems of the day. It also requires more insights into the solutions that might result in financially successful and environmentally friendly outcomes. Business models are evolving through the development of the participative customer as a means to get closer to the action; where the economic customer is seeing financial value in the network.

Social Networks:
Look at some of the latest innovation ecologies, these are essentially crowdsource based idea generators, that emerged over the last 2 years or so. Coke, Starbucks, Apple, IBM, etc all now have active and very vibrant idea to innovation communities that allow customers, competitors, and staff to interact in an integrated world of information sharing. They leverage the organization’s shadow and the industry’s undercurrents to gain deep understanding of of the shifts that are taking place. So, instead of copying, they allow for the crowds to co-produce and co-design the intended future. Market segmentation and coarse grained approaches will disappear and swarm based approaches and unique value approaches will emerge.

Our approach to delivering value is “Social Based Innovation”. Leveraging the shadow organization in achieving innovative outcomes. It’s not about product innovation; it’s about the offering. It’s not about process innovation; it’s about capability innovation. It’s about leveraging the social value in the business and not the elitist team that’s responsible for innovation. It’s about mobilizing the crowd through tribes and not the formal structure where innovations get trapped.

Obsessive Execution:
It’s in the portfolio; the success of your innovation efforts. The translation and articulation into meaningful actions. It’s the journey “from here and now, to here and now”.

Let’s take a view on innovation terminology that’s still in use today; “product based innovation”. Maybe the concept called “product” does not exist. Maybe there is only “service based innovation”. Take the chair you’re sitting on as an example; is it a product or a service? It was designed at a point in time where the collective knowledge of chair making and manufacturing got frozen and encapsulated into that chair. But, it is used to deliver a service for you tonight. It might be comfortable easy to adjust, etc making it a great service delivery platform. If the chair is not comfortable will you walk away thinking that the night was not useful?

We are living in times of seismic change and accelerated shifts in paradigms. Reframed thinking results in new business configurations being tested and uncharted territories unearthed. This results in business renewal activity that impacts the human component of the business directly. Social shifts result in people looking at the world differently.

Humans are integrated with technology and used as a driver to deliver new growth platforms. What are the new emerging practices of innovation as social networks connect people like never before? Can we learn from the historical successes of innovation? How are successful companies using innovation to compete in this fast changing world? Where does human innovation fit in the new business?

This presentation covers four key areas when looking at Social Based Innovation:
- Where has the customer paradigm taken us as crowdsourcing emerges
- How does the social network affect the human-technology ecosystem
- Using innovation capabilities to drive obsessive execution in the innovation ecology
- Forget about talent we need to focus on harnessing genius

These critical questions will be answered through case studies and insights into the latest innovation findings.

Service Design is an approach used by iconic design and innovation firm, IDEO. It is the practice of designing intangible experiences that reach people through different touch-points. The purpose is to influence these interactions in such a way that financial and benefits are positive to the firm. Realistically these intangible experiences are very hard to quantify and even harder to describe in processes.

Great service designs emerge over time and have the ability to capture the essence of the interactions between humans and humans and computers. Often a great design is only identified once it is created; the act of making it relies on deep experience of the designer together with the ability to immerse in the activity that is being designed. This results in “I’ll know it when I see it…”.

Due to the emergent nature of this type of design; you require many different view points that cut across the organization. Using a social based approach allows for interested and other parties top collaborate in ways never explicitly designed before. The add-hoc nature of the interaction drives the energy and interest to solve the service design challenge.

We believe that studying cycles of change can teach us something about the world we’re in. But, every now and then a change comes along that shifts our perception of the world pushing our reasoning beyond all logic. Our inability to read signs of change push us into uncomfortable territory.

Economic systems, human reasoning about financial systems, and the current reasoning of the business world are all under scrutiny. We are concerned about the environment and global warming. Our renewed interest in human rights and the global population explosion all contribute to uncertain times.

This presentation takes the audience through a journey of some of the signs that need to be understood. It is a journey that starts with some of the key and fundamental challenges of modern commerce, and ends with some of the unanswered questions of our current state.

Sustainable and successful organisations have the ability to explore new frontiers of competitiveness during challenging times. New business configurations and alternate uses of scarce resources are tested and uncharted territories unearthed. Innovation is used as an approach to drive competitiveness. But, the influence of new technologies and the ability to respond to changes affect the organization’s delivery capability.

Innovation disciplines are used to drive growth opportunities whilst protecting existing platforms of operation. This results in a number of critical questions being left unanswered. What’s involved with the practice of innovation? How are the most successful companies using innovation to compete in this fast changing world? Where and how can technology be used to drive innovation success? What can we learn from these (and previous) experiences?

This workshop has been broken down into a number of topic areas that highlight different aspects of how business renewal can drive performance through innovation and emergence. It brings together the realms of strategy for innovation and the ability to re-invent the business to ensure successful outcomes in this highly competitive and fragile business environment. Social Based Innovation approaches are unveiled and the participant is taken on a journey of reframing…

I’ve been discussion many concepts relating to innovation over the last few years. But kept the development of our new approach under wraps as we are testing some of the constructs. So, let me give you a sniplet of what’s been going on.

Working globally with financial services, manufacturing, and other services firms we discovered some interesting concepts in innovation. You would’ve noticed that I have a number of posts on social networking (the hot topic of the day I guess), and other social related phenomena. All these contribute partly to the concept of Social Based Innovation.

The initial definition is:
Social Based Innovation is the ability to influence social actions in such a way, that benefit is obtained by the social group in its tribal setting, behaving in a way that value is captured by the collective.

Shadow organizations as they are called, refer to the social interactions that happen outside of the formal structures as defined by leadership. These shadows are often overlooked as sources of value and not nurtured. Social Based Innovation as an approach is used to capture value holistically by allowing all dimensions of the community to interact. This drives the tribal approach where common beliefs and ideas are developed even if these are from customers, employees, competitors, or other traditional constructs. Crowdsourcing, Co-production, crowd spirit, etc are concepts that try to capture the emerging world of social mobilization. Leveraging communities as crowds that influence your innovation mandate has become a new topic of discussion.

Some notes on where reward systems (check out McKinsey&Company’s And the winner is… paper) and Social Based Innovation intersect:
- Identify excellence through social rating approach and tribal acceptance and co-development of ideas and innovations.
- Influence public perception by exposing a wider community to rewards for great ideas and innovations.
- Focus a community by getting the entire social group involved in collective activity for common purpose without the traditional organizational boundaries.
- Identify and mobilize new talent by allowing individuals to have creative freedom during idea development and guidance through implementation.
- Strengthen the community by getting tribes actively involved in problem solving.
- Educate and improve skills by getting champions of innovation to emerge based on their attitudinal and aptitude towards innovation. These people can then assist others in achieving more in the network.
- Mobilize capital once the strategic intent of the campaign and involvement of the formal and social structures have delivered a verdict.

Is innovation as a discipline evolving faster than before due to the effects of social networking?

I came across Adizes’s work some 10 years ago. The concepts he promoted made sense and I started reading his work extensively. After buying 8 videos from the Adizes Institute and working through these over time, I got to understand his views.

In 1999 he published “Managing Corporate Lifecycles” that provides great insights into how organizations evolve over time. He has the ability to articulate clearly some complex change phenomena making him quite unique. You can also do a self test on his website to determine where you fit on his model; Understanding the Corporate Lifecycle: Get an Instant Online Lifecycle Analysis.

Today we have a need to rethink business and not apply the dogma of the day, but find new methods and approaches, and question the basics of how leaders take their businesses forward. There is a new world emerging and those that believe in a static set of concepts will follow the academic rhetoric of the past. This creates the situation trap that most managers find themselves in. I’ve been questioning the basics of much of where modern strategy and innovation is developed from; and the picture is still pretty bleak. It took major global catastrophes, climate change and a few crisis’s to get people to sit up and question their ways.

… that’s why I like this entry from Adizes…

This is from his latest posting:
[snip]
Waiting for a plane in Kiev, Ukraine, I picked up the Harvard Business Review from January 2009. Although I do not typically read this magazine, because it is so alien to my way of thinking, I did so because I was bored.

As I should have predicted, I became quite intellectually disturbed reading some passages and wondering, am I on the wrong track or is “the establishment,” as represented by Harvard, on an old, outdated track?

For example, page 21 on what it means to be a leader: “Leaders on the front line must anticipate merely what comes after current projects wrap up. People at the next level of leadership should be looking several years into the future. And those at the C suite must focus on a horizon some ten years distant.”

Well, being proactive requires anticipating the future, granted. Predicting the future is a necessary variable, but not sufficient in itself to make one a successful leader. The variables have to also be sufficient to produce the desired results, in this case to lead the company to success.
[snip]

Have a look at his web site at www.adizes.com.

We have been working with innovation related projects for many years now – and observed many different approaches work. This creates a challenge in that “innovation practices” are still emerging. The approaches followed are almost as diverse as the number of books published on the subject. There are however a number of common things that need to be looked at; some of these include:
- focus on understanding your approach first
- commit to the approach and work on embedding it into your culture
- get people energized to apply the newly acquired knowledge
- let ideas emerge (similarly to the way you’ve always done it)
- work on one change at a time and move forward from there
- reward successes and ensure that company measures are not undermined
- make it a long-term journey…

Based on some of these heuristics, innovation software products should contain some(or all) of these features as a minimum:

Manage ideation, innovation and adoption cycles:
- create observations (general learnings, market scans, landscaping)
- create ideas (as result of individual genius, workshopping, creative sessions, etc)
- create innovations (as result of reviewing ideas, etc)
- create projects (decide to spend money on realizing the ideas/innovations)

Staged idea/innovation capture:
- basic idea recording mechanisms (to simplify the process)
- deadlines, and other time based information
- investment needed and other monetary related information
- process and staged based information collection (especially for clients with stage-gate based approaches)

Project management integration:
- realize ideas through creating projects from the selected ideas

Setting of challenges and prizes:
- set a challenge on an idea with deadline, prize, and intended outcome

Define innovation campaigns based on strategic initiatives:
- define innovation campaigns based on context setting approaches
- target innovators to participate
- set challenges
- reward winners and achievers

Invite specialists:
- invite specialists to assist with developing your ideas (maybe through tribes?)
- create “call for review” notifications to elicit feedback
- create innovation workshops with directed purpose statements to facilitate specialized input

Define key measures for dashboarding:
- have the basic measures on dashboard depending on your position in the org structure or social network
- produce an automated innovation portfolio based on key measures
- have “socially aware” ideas move to the top automatically
- have “socially inept” ideas move sideways into “please review”

Integrate with NPD (new product development):
- define product and service targets (which to get ideas for)
- have idea approval and grouping by version/release/platform numbers for products
- integrate with legal process especially for trade marks, patents, copyrights, company secrets

Idea value analysis:
- group ideas by external and internal related criteria
- value the market potential of ideas for external use
- value ideas based on cost saving etc for internal use
- define portfolio balancing criteria

Knowledge management platform:
- integrate patent portfolio and other legal innovation constructs
- integrate field knowledge acquired throughout field testing and trials
- get information from various sources through mash-ups
- flag ideas as “company secrets” or secret ideas
- initiate prototypes, etc

Idea evaluation analysis:
- ideas that are discovered and copied
- entirely new ideas
- science based processes, etc

Idea and innovation clustering:
- search for like ideas and relate together with reason code
- allow idea consolidation

Idea and innovation workshop manager:
- define workshop purpose and objectives
- collect many ideas; but don;t “commit” to them
- review the collected ideas and produce an approved set
- measure effectiveness of session
- get participants involved electronically by viewing ideas on-line in real-time
- map ideas onto the Opportunity/Capability or other innovation models

Innovation e-learning integration:
- get access to all basic innovation terminology
- allow for brief learning sessions before ideas are captured
- track learning on the dashboard

Innovation tracking and energizing:
- track and monitor innovation “energy”
- understand who are creating ideas and at what pace
- automatically generate “innovation stimulation” activity for eg. e-mails, SMS’s etc

Community:
- structural and social based community collaboration to be allowed
- allow customers to see certain ideas and capture their own
- allow certain external intellectual and other providers to participate in the innovation process
- allow your legal firm access to key legal challenges

This is by no means a complete list of the features needed to manage automated idea management approaches in organziations, but it provides some insight into some of the important features. The simpler the approach the more effective the adoption will be.

Have a look at www.ReframingBusiness.com.

Aussie bikie gangs are causing trouble in Sydney. Hoons race around having accidents on public roads. The Wallabie’s are working on their game. Breakie is what you have to eat in the morning. … language …

F1 Practice (short video) The Formula 1 race yesterday delivered some interesting results and was a great event to attend in Melbourne. Jenson Button won the race after an amazing performance. Richard Branson’s luck in top form: he signed the Brawn team the day before, and they delivered the goods. Button earned more points in this race than all the races put together over the previous two years. There are over 500 groups on Facebook dedicated to F1 and related activity.

Check this word: Facebookemon
MARCH 23 2785 up, 4497 down
The term used for the collection of people, on your Facebook friends list, that you don’t actually talk to or know in real life. Related to popular tv program and game pokeamon, where the aim is to collect as many diffrent Pocket Monsters as possible.
Dave – “Hey, my friends collection is getting up to two hundred”
Steve – “How many do you really know? go admit it, most of them are Facebookemon”
John – “Gotta catch em all, gotta catch em all”
- from urbandictionary

All you can see are people on their notebooks catching up on their Facebook detail; what a sight. So, how many of those people in conversations are real? Do we care if all we need is to be connected and get feedback?

I had a great trip to Australia and am currently sitting in the Sydney airport after a strike was announced this morning. And, without any warning. There is no assistance in the airport and the ground staff don’t know what’s going on, so the flight is delayed for a while. I did see some “blue collar recruitment” people running around… Every now and then a voice comes over the microphone just saying “delays are to be expected” – and that’s it! Maybe someone on Facebook will know and I don’t care if I know them or not, does this make me a facebookemon?

Fear is universal. Fear of the unknown is universal. Fear does not know boundaries. Fear alters the behavior of humans. Humans are fearful. Humans are even more fearful when crowded together. And, even more fearful when crowded in physical-world hot-houses and virtual-world real-time based information over exposure. The current crises is really visible when you bounce between Johannesburg, Cape Town, London, Tel-Aviv, Dubai, Melbourne and Sydney in a few months are compare the emotional fear with the “real” numbers. I’ve been doing to much traveling lately.

This [era] is probably the trigger point for a new period in capitalism. The access to information in real-time is the platform that created the ability to innovate and adopt offerings and capabilities much faster than ever before. Our obsessive over-connectedness fuels a sense of being on top of things, that creates safety in trying to understand the unknown. Money (Check this by New Scientist) as a concept is now deeply imbedded in our social make-up and affects us emotionally more than ever.

Size and geographical security, as attributes of stability, are gone now. Having a “large” organization as an employer in some 1st world country does not guarantee anything (for those that believe that guarantees are worth anything). In actual fact it is more dangerous as the emotional stability that comes with believing that growth will continue indefinitely, is partially responsible for getting crowds to believe that there is safety in “numbers”.

In Capitalist World 1.0, the boss decided who got the bonus and what the amount needs to be based on financial performance. But, if your business received a “bailout” from the government and is now owned by the people, the boss has shifted to a new form of controlling body. Basically you do not decide anything, and if you do and it is not liked, the backlash will surely kill you. Look at AIG’s bonus payouts and the outcry it created globally.

Paradigms have shifted; and those who believe that they haven’t, wake up.

Innovation is under scrutiny in the financial services world as global competitive pressures force organizations to rethink their business models and operating environments. Can financial services organizations benefit from innovation? How are the most successful companies using innovation to compete in this fast changing world? How can the incumbents participate in this new world of financial reconfiguration.

Bank 2.0 is a presentation about the new view of where financial services might end up. The cycles and waves of change are forcing the world to rethink the dogma of yesteryear.

This presentation covers some of the important aspects companies need to understand about the ways in which innovation is used to compete in dynamic markets. Some of the topics include:
- The meaning of innovation in the financial services organization. Is innovation responsible?
- A bruised landscape and faulty maps of execution. Useless strategies and broken crystal balls.
- Cycles of disruption and emergent paradigms. The contemporary role of “customer”.
- Social network phenomena and the relationship with financial services.
- Innovation Tools for a new age.

Once in a while people come along that change our perceptions of business, who we want to be, what we can be, and generally what is achievable in a world where we all want to make an impact. I’ve not posted an entry for more than a month now; and as you know there is no excuse… But, after traveling for most of Jan and Feb, I wanted to connect with a friend on my return.

As is customary in my office, my assistant that is highly efficient and really great at getting my life organized plan meetings for me to keep my diary full. Essentially she is my social network energizer. Sidney Bernic is an entrepreneur, social architect and great business mind that I connect with periodically and we share some great ideas; generally discussing topics like “what will change the world as we know it”.

I expected a lunch, breakfast or general get-together and instead got a message from his office to PHONE his office before talking to him. This is strange as we speak about business, personal and other topics generally directly to each other. On this day shortly after my return I received shocking news…

He is in his early 50’s, filled with energy, incredible business acumen, focused on success, a wonderful family man. His office is like a 12 year old’s playground with Disney toys and other great gaming gadgets keeping creativity at its optimal level. I just watched some of the footage we took of Sidney talking of innovation and achievements in business at our innovation conferences – a master at work.

This entry is dedicated to a great mind with a passion for people, innovation and his faith. An individual that is in constant pursuit of purpose! Get well soon, we are thinking of you.

Some reflections:
- There is too little time Not to Pursue Meaningful Activity
- Pursue meaningful relationships and remove those that drag you down
- Reward systems are about the emotional first, and then the financial
- Help others achieve greatness
- Leave a legacy

Check his blog…