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:

What is SROI? - A couple of useful papers for download

I've turned my previous post into a very short paper you can download for reference.

And in case you want something more in-depth here's the REDF paper on exploring value creation in non-profit sector

Social Return on Investment (SROI)

For many of us who are looking to start up a social enterprise, the framework of Social Return on Investment (SROI) could prove to be crucial in both understanding and presenting our social impacts in economic terms. Anything that helps us raise funding and support has to be worth taking seriously, so here's a short overview of SROI.

According to the SROI-UK Network , SROI is an approach to understanding and managing the impacts of a project, organisation or policy. It is based on important impacts that stakeholders identify and puts financial value on outcomes that do not have market values. SROI therefore is a framework. It’s a story, not just a number.

The story should show how you:

1. Understand the value created
2. Manage it
3. Can prove it

It was developed in the early 1990s, by a non-profit social enterprise called The Roberts Enterprise Development Fund [REDF] who began to analyse its SROI to help illustrate in monetary terms the value generated through an investment in its social programmes.

For social entrepreneurs there are 3 avenues of value creation:

1. Economic: creating services or products that have greater market value than their inputs e.g. any commercial business
2. Social: creating services or products that have a provably beneficial impact on society e.g. anti-racism initiatives
3. Socio-Economic: creating services or products that increase the market value of inputs but also generate cost savings for the public system or environment e.g. employment programs

Why should you care?

The key point to note is that the SROI analysis is essentially a robust argument for your non-profit or social enterprise to be at least partially compensated or credited for the value it creates in the marketplace. This could be either through public funding or CSR investment.

To create your SROI analysis you need to do the following:

1. Examine your social service activity over a given time frame (usually five to 10 years);
2. Calculate the amount of "investment" required to support that social activity and analyze the capital structure in place to support it
3. Identify the various cost savings, reductions in spending and related benefits that accrue to your public system as a result of what you're doing
4. Calculate the economic value of those cost savings and related benefits
5. Discount those savings back to the beginning of the investment time frame using a net present value (NPV) and/or discounted cash flow analysis
6. Finally present the Socio-Economic Value created during the investment time frame, by expressing that value in terms of NPV and SROI rates and ratios.

And yes, it clearly points towards needing a decent accountant!

Still, the benefits of having an SROI framework are clear. It will help you

• Understand the real value of what your enterprise/organisation does
• Raise finance more easily
• Get public sector support more easily
• Improve reporting on positive changes caused by your organisation
• Develop a better organisational structure, with improved strategies, systems and accountability
• Improve your ability to manage risks and identify opportunities required to achieve your mission

References

• Harvard Business School SROI Overview
• London Business School SROI Primer
• SROI-UK Network

Download

Download this post on SROI as a pdf

Trends in Logo Design

Since I've been talking about branding I thought I'd have a look at logo design. Personally I'm a big believer in designing logos that can stand alone from any text and still be clearly identifiable as your organisation. Think Nike, Apple, Microsoft Windows and the original Adidas logos. Anyway, I recently came across a cool post on trends in visual design for logos.

So if you're thinking of starting a new enterprise or are in the process of updating your brand, here are some thoughts below based on a post from logoorange.

1. 3D: the organic rather than blocky sort. Be careful though. Here's the Microsoft Silverlight example. Visually nice - yes. Memorable - no!
   
   
   


2. Waves: Apparently the swoosh is dead. It's all about waves with fades these days.
   
   



3. "Web 2.0": Think rounded corners and glassy
   
   
   


4. Transparency: Subtle effects are in
   
   
   
   


5. Minimal "Underground" Typography: None of these still exist so no idea what that says about this form of logo!
   
   
   


6. Rainbow Color Scales: Unfortunately everytime I see anything like this I think 'Polaroid'! Other examples are SpaceTime and ElasticDigital. Their logos look really similar though.
   
   
   


7. Sci-Fi Fonts: You can end up looking very tech geek or "video-gamey", so be careful.
   
   
   


8. Leaves: Green is big right now. Leaves help you ride the eco wave and can give your brand that fresh peaceful look.
   


9. The "Ugly" 80's: What can you say about this, except that it's a risky strategy unless you're of the belief that even bad publicity is still good!
   
   
   


10. The New Crest: Medieval symbolism and urban culture graphic elements can be very cool if done well. If not, they just look complicated and impossible to identify the company within.
    
    

Innovation and iVolntr

iVolntr.org falls into the Type III innovation category as defined in NESTA's 'Total Innovation' report. It is about tying together a host of digital editing technologies (like google docs), existing social networks (like facebook), and open standards (like opensocial and the dataportability initiative) to remove the existing perceptual and real barriers to volunteering (particularly for the facebook generation) and thus change the way volunteering is perceived and done.

The project is about crowdsourcing time and skill on a many-to-one-basis to facilitate people helping people, and people helping organisations; by creating, commenting and editing individual and organisational information directly through the webpage in immediate response to need or request. It will be primarily designed to support social organisations and disadvanted groups in developed information economies like ours, where so much is facilitated by or done through desktop computing.

iVolntr then is essentially about innovation in social behaviour and the development of Personal Social Responsibility (PSR). By removing the commitment, physicality and localisation factors present in traditional volunteering models, as well as removing the effort in finding out about opportunities to help (for eg. through a facebook app) we should be able to leverage personal need for social kudos to create a sustainable culture of social enthusiasm and a sustainable supply of help for disadvantaged individuals and the third sector.

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.