4 Phases of Innovation

Innovation really has turned into the buzzword for 2008. In case, like most people, you still don't know what innovating is really all about here's a quick intro. According to Iris Mootee on the Future Lab blog, apparently going from idea to mass market adoption happens in 4 phases, all of which involve innovation.

1. The Fuzzy Front End (FFE), which involves a lot of insight gathering, ideation and early conceptualization
   
   
2. New Product Development (NPD) process, which involves design and engineering prototyping
   
   
3. Early-Stage Commercialization (ESC), where ideas are needed to inform how the product is being brought to market (usually small underserved or unserved market/segments)
   
   
4. Driving Mass Adoption (DMA), where innovation is applied to mass market the product/service and considerations include how to use this disruptive innovation to upset the market dynamics and economics.

The Future Is Chrome... Or Is It?

In a nutshell the answer is No

Until the way we browse fundamentally changes, new entrants like Google's new browser 'Chrome' really have nothing to add for the majority of users. The future is touch screen and voice commands. When these start to become ubiquitous, what the mass market needs from browsers will change. At that point there will be a big gap for new entrants.

If Chrome was setting itself up to exploit that change, we'd be looking at the early rumblings of a browsing revolution. But it isn't.

The browser is not finger touch oriented in anyway, and in fact the functionality has become more mouse based, fiddly and precision oriented. There isn't even the 'alt' functionality needed for disabled access technologies.

So no, for the moment I don't really see Chrome taking over the world. I suspect it will be just another player like Firefox. I'll be keeping an eye on it anyway from the perspective of USP development, so if anything new comes to light that changes my view, I'll be sure to keep you posted!

Meantime if you want to know a bit more about this, read the full article on my other blog - www.multichannelthinking.com.

Did You Know? (Shift Happens Update)

Some months ago I put up a slideshow by Karl Fisch called Shift Happens, which I think was created in about 2006. I recently came across some updates created in 2007, so thought I'd share them with you.

The most interesting thing about these updates is that even though they were created barely a year ago, neither mentions the impact of mobile telephone technology. Mobile innovation is transforming the developing world, bringing affordable communication, banking, social and commercial services to rural places where no physical infrastructure exists. It has exploded in the last year, and its impact is finally being recognised over the past couple of months. I'll put up some links related to this when I can. Effectively we're seeing a shift that's happening so fast that even social discussion can't keep up with it!

Anyway here's a couple of interesting video presentations that follow up on Shift Happens.

Did you know - Part 2

Did you know - Part 4
(Part 3 is very similar and was revised to Part 4 a couple months later. You can find it on Youtube if you like)

They both essentially question whether our education systems are keeping up with these shifts and providing young people with the knowledge they need to survive in a rapidly shifting global economy.

What do you think?

Socialising Intelligence With The Urban Survival Project

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social intelligence)

I've been meaning to put up this presentation on Socialising Intelligence for a few weeks now, but held off as I was planning to turn it into a slidecast with audio. Unfortunately I'm so busy at the moment that it's just going to have to be the slides I'm afraid!

Anyway, I created this for a talk at the last Ogunte event on Facilitating Social Intelligence and Women's Role In It, and it seemed to go down pretty well. It is essentially about social intelligence and how it fits with what I'm trying to do with the Urban Survival Project.

The basic gist is that our societal definition of intelligence is Academic, which makes it a function of economics. And since we have social economic differentials, we also have social intelligence differentials. Balancing out these differentials is what I call Socialising Intelligence. In other words it is about facilitating knowledge transfer in order to create a collective social intelligence.

In essence then, USP is about using web technologies to create a community platform to enable knowledge transfer between those who have it and those who don't. Check the slides out. They are short, simple and pictorial.

Enjoy!

Ken Robinson on Creativity

This is a fantastic presentation by Ken Robinson at a TED conference. About 20 minutes long, but really fun and engaging. Watch if you can!

(If it doesn't play, watch it on the TED site here - http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66)

The gist of it - Ken contends that creativity is as important as literacy and should be treated with the same status. He defines creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value and highlights that it comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

Here's the thing. Kids will take a chance. If they don't know the answer they'll have a go anyway. They're not frightened of being wrong. If you're not prepared to be wrong you're not going to come up with anything original. As you grow up you become frightened to be wrong because we stigmatise mistakes, and we're now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. Effectively we're educating people out of their creative capacities.

We need to radically change our view of intelligence. It is diverse, dynamic, and distinct; and it's expressed through distinct and different avenues - some creative, some physical, some academic. Consequently he believes only hope for the future is to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity.

Google's 9 Principles of Innovation

If Google's successes can be attributed to these principles, then they have to be worth modelling your own startup or enterprise around

1. Ideas come from everywhere - it's not about frameworks and enforced ideation
2. Share everything you can - don't be territorial and give credit for ideas
3. You're brilliant, we're hiring - when you meet someone exceptional, fit them in even if you don't actually have a role
4. A license to pursue dreams - make space for your people to explore tangential ideas
5. Innovation, not instant perfection - start rough, learn and iterate
6. Data is apolitical - be specific with measurement and data and make decisions based on it
7. Creativity loves constraints - fixing at least a few parameters helps people start thinking out of the box
8. It's users, not money - if you can successfully engage users, you can monetise them
9. Don't kill projects, morph them - figure out how to repackage and rejuvenate struggling projects rather than waste invested ideas, time and money by shutting them down completely

Watch and listen to Google's Marissa Mayer on the 9 Principles:

The Lifecycle of Innovation

This is a great illustration by Tom Fishburne of what can happen to your fantastic idea once realities bite!

Are you innovating without knowing it? - A look at NESTA's 4 Types of Hidden Innovation

In light of general pessimism about the state of innovation in the UK, NESTA have published a research report called 'Total Innovation'. 100 pages of mostly impenetrable writing with sentences the size of paragraphs. The key bit of the report however is the focus on 'hidden innovation' and NESTA defines 4 types which are worth sharing.

In our current world innovation has, as NESTA put it, become "synonymous with scientific and technological invention born of new research-driven knowledge." However innovation can be social, behavioural, organisational etc. Recognising this should help raise awareness that just because you aren't involved in tech research doesn't mean that you aren't innovating.

Unhelpfully these other types of innovation have been titled Type I, Type II, Type III and Type IV, so I'm going to use a bit of creative license and title them by their descriptions

1. Type I: Practical Research - eg. Engineering solutions developed through 'on-the-job' learning rather than through lab research.
2. Type II: New Organisational and Business Models - eg. Semi-autonomous business units in the pharmaceutical industry reflecting the entrepreneurial nature of small bio-tech firms.
3. Type III: Novel combination of existing technologies and processes - eg. Using existing functions and routines to deliver new services
4. Type IV: Micro-Innovations - eg. Small scale manufacturing problems and challenges dealt with outside R&D programmes

I found this interesting because it helped me understand that by doing something new with existing technologies, we can be recognised as innovating too. iVoluntr.org will fall into the Type III category. I'll explain why in a follow-on post.

Shift Happens

Here's an interesting slideshow originally created by Karl Fisch, examining changes happening as we move forward. As entrepreneurs and social movement builders I figure it's worth keeping an eye on what's happening to global culture, but this presentation is pretty cool from any perspective.

View Upload your own

Shift happens has been updated since this original presentation - I've put up the latest versions in my later post "Did you Know (Shift Happens Update)"

Disruptive Innovation - Some pointers

I've recently begun to get more involved in the area of disruptive social innovation, to a large extent because that's exactly what the Urban Survival Project is all about. Anyway, innovation being the buzzword of the moment, is now being used in so many contexts that it's going the way of most jargon; i.e. no one's entirely sure exactly what it's supposed to mean. "Disruptive Innovation" as a term only complicates the matter and makes even less sense. So here's a few notes to help demystify Disruptive Innovation, thanks to Rhea who got me talking about it the other night.

To start with, here's an excerpt from a post I'd written a short while ago around disruptive social innovation. "Disruptive innovation is about creating something that fundamentally shifts the way things are done. Using analogies from Systems Thinking, the whole world is a complex web of interactions that localise around tightly linked processes that are all loosely linked to other localised processes. Disrupting the norm in one small area then, can have a follow on effect to the way the whole world works."

The guy who's written the most around Disruptive Innovation is Clayton Christensen. Here's a snapshot of his model.

You can also preview some of his books on Google Books. I think the latest one is called Seeing What's Next

• A more detailed overview can be found on the 12manage website: http://www.12manage.com/methods_christensen_disruptive_innovation.html
• One of the more interesting books on innovation is the Medici Effect, which you can download for free off the web.
• I like the Systems Thinking approach, but here's an article around some diagnostic tools for innovation you might want to look at: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/4300.html
• A good blog around innovation is in the BusinessWeek Online -- NussbaumOnDesign

Other concepts worth looking at in relation to disruptive innovation are Design Thinking and some of the principles behind User Centred Design. I'll cover these a bit more in a future post.

Happy reading :)

Networking technologies of the future?

Considering that this project is planned to essentially end up as one or more volunteer based websites that link into the social networking sites we all currently use, I guess the question of what technology to build it with can't really be avoided. Given the young professional demographic I think we should focus on, Facebook is the obvious place to start.

Facebook then, provides a set of APIs that third parties can use to build applications that link in to its website. An API is an 'Application Programming Interface', which basically means that it allows applications and websites to communicate with each other without having to write lots of complicated code. I'd point to the wikipedia definition but frankly its pretty impossible to understand! Anyway, key point is that this interface is specific to Facebook only. If we wanted to link into other sites we'd have to repeat the whole process again.

But timing couldn't be better because the geniuses at Google have just released OpenSocial, which does the same thing as the Facebook API but for a whole range for social networking sites simultaneously. It allows developers to access the following core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Which would be great if Facebook was part of the mix. But it isn't. Still, all's not lost, because a couple of guys on the web have set up OpenSocket which is a project to bridge the gap between Facebook and OpenSocial. So I guess its a case of watching this space...

Finally, there's also FOAF. Did we really need another acronym?? But it is worth a mention because it could well be the future beyond Facebook and MySpace. FOAF or the "Friend of a Friend" project is a "simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online." Unlike the others this is about standards based freely available tools. This could just be the next disruptive technology and another one to keep an eye on.

If you or anyone you know knows how to develop on any of these platforms, or is a budding genius looking to explore these for fun or to boost their CV... drop us a note :)