My friday at PICNIC ’08 started at the workshop ‘The Power of Co-Creation’ by Albert Boswijk (European Centre for the Experience Economy) and Raul Lansink (Favela Fabric). The workshop was actually partially co-created by the attendees: everyone shared their questions on co-creation and examples of co-creation. These drove the discussion and any unanswered questions will be sent to all attendees in the near future. Besides the classical Lego, Fiat and other examples also other initiatives were mentioned by the audience. Amongst them the Amsterdam Balloon Party where guests dress-up and do mini-performances themselves on a specific theme. One of the attendees mentioned the launch of an Ikea initiative (‘Rip Ikea’) to stimulate users to go freestyle with their furniture parts and thus create new objects. We saw this on the recent Hacking Ikea design event, but she may have implied a further roll-out of this concept.
Raul pointed out that co-creation is suited for small incremental innovations and no “big bang” ideas are to be expected. He also stated that it is all about a ‘contract’ between an organisation and their co-creators, where the organisation promises to listen and act/deliver upon the outcome of the proces. Managing and living up to user expectations as well as the willingness to experience the yet unknown outcome, are the actual key factors to successful co-creation.
Monthly Archives: September 2008
PICNIC ‘08
Trends and Best Practices in Adopting Web 2.0 in 2008
Through the blogpost of Bill Ives I got directed to the Awareness report on the Trends and Best Practices in Adopting Web 2.0 in 2008. The results of the survey are not surprising but the overall message is very promising for the adoption of Web 2.0 solutions in the enterprise.
The survey focuses both on using Web 2.0 as external-facing tools as well as internal-facing tools. As an Innovation Consultant working on Enterprise 2.0 projects my interest points toward the internal-facing use of the tools.
It is encouraging to see that the Enterprise 2.0 projects we are working on are getting more widely accepted and appreciated.
For example I have been working on several internal wiki projects, during all of these projects the idea of an external-facing wiki came up. I think that addressing the external community is far more effective when using blogs, social networks or communities, just as the figures in the report show and the following statement also underlines this: “However, only 33 percent of respondents expect to employ wikis on an external-facing community, believing that wikis are of greater benefit to employees than consumers.”
For another client we created and managed a platform to increase innovation within the company. This platform is aimed for the most innovative employees in the company to share their knowledge, improve internal communication, and to connect with each other. The following quote from the report underlines our efforts:
“Organizations working on project with the use of these Web 2.0 technologies will increase knowledge-sharing and employee collaboration (82 percent), improve internal communications (78 percent) and help employees find and help each other (59 percent). Ideally, these applications will improve horizontal and vertical cooperation, provide a convenient platform for knowledge sharing, facilitate closer collaboration between employees, nurture teambuilding and create loyalty to their organization. “
eDay 2008
Yesterday we were at eDay in Rotterdam. eDay is a yearly conference organized by Emerce a leading Dutch Internet magazine. The main theme of the day was crowdsourcing.
The day was kicked off by Jeff Howe. He crowdsourced his way to Rotterdam! Howe wrote one of the leading books on crowdsourcing. If you’ve read his book, his presentation did not really bring news.
The second speaker I saw was Dan Lyons from Newsweek with a hilarious story about a blog he had “The secret Diary of Steve Jobs”. With over 1 million unique visitors a month, a great success. The interesting point from a crowdsourcing perspective was that it took Dan a long time to realize that it wasn’t just his talent that made the blog so successful but that for a large part it was due to the fact that readers were contributing in a fantastic way. It became a stage for very creative and talented people.
The next speaker I saw was Brian Kalma from Zappos (a very successful online shoe retailer in the US). They are said to be so successful because of their outstanding service. Because of this outstanding service the crowd does a large part of their advertizing. Brian talked about a lot of aspects that lead to their success. He had a number of examples of their service. One of which is the fact that when a customer is looking for a shoe they don’t stock, the customer service rep searches competitor sites and directs the customer there. They claim that the next time the customer will come to them first. Brian mentioned a lot internet activities that make them so successful. However, to me the most important aspect of their success is their culture. I would have liked to hear more about the way they created and foster it.
The next speaker I heard was Andre Convents from Procter & Gamble. P&G are
famous for their Connect & Develop program where their ambition is that 50% of new revenue comes from innovation with the outside world. Something that startled me was that if P&G want to grow their revenue (through innovation) by 4% annually, they need 100 million Dollars of new business every week. An important way of connecting to the outside world is to look for products that are successful in a specific geographical area. They can pick that up and make the product big because they have a world wide market reach. For P&G it’s a great win because they do not need to invest as much in product development and the initial consumer tests, which was done by the other company. For the company that initially marketed the product it’s a win because they profit from the distribution power of P&G. Finally, I jotted down this interesting statement: “Research is money transfered to knowledge. Innovation is knowledge transfered to money.”
I then moved on to a speach by Dave Blank from Twente University (The Netherlands). In one hour he told us what Nanotechnology can bring us in the future. I’m not even going to try and summarize it, but I was blown away and so was everyone else.
I saw Joris van Heukelom from Ilse media. He had a great story about “Henk” and “Pimmetje” that showed us the immense difference in the way two generations use the new media. Pimmetje being a connected modern young person and Henk being a marketeer in his forties.
The interesting aspect I picked up from Julie Meyer from Ariadne Capital was that start-ups are increasingly being seen as an alternative for market research.
Lawrence Lessig closed the day with a formidable presentation about the new creative class and the fact that the current/old copyright laws just do not apply to the way these kids behave. The point he makes is that every (nice) kid breaks the law in the way they use the internet. They don’t break the law because they are criminals, but because the laws no longer suffice. If you constantly break a non sufficient law, you lose respect for the entire system.
Ideation Workshop at Reed Business
Innovation Factory facilitates idea generation workshop at Reed Business!
Easy idea generation
SCAMPER is a method to help generate ideas for innovation. It is an easy variant of the types of “analytic” idea generation methods like TRIZ and SIT. SCAMPER boils the sets of rules of TRIZ and SIT down to just 7:
- S = Substitute
- C = Combine
- A = Adapt
- M = Magnify
- P = Put to Other Uses
- E = Eliminate (or Minify)
- R = Rearrange (or Reverse)
On http://litemind.com/scamper-tool/ is a simple SCAMPER tool that helps you to get started with SCAMPER.
A funny measure of innovativeness
I was thinking about the ways companies try to get ideas into the marketplace and I noticed there are three general categories of getting ideas into the marketplace that are all considered innovative by the general business community. However, the interesting thing is that in practice we see that each of these three categories often indicate different states of innovativeness. I would like to share these thoughts with you.
Social Strategy Talk II
Yesterday a delegation from Innovation Factory visited Social Strategy Talk II at Westerunie in Amsterdam. It was great! Next to giving you a very concise summary of the conference, I will present you with two very important lessons that were put forward.
The first lesson was mentioned by Carl Lens of Creative Crowds in the introduction talk: “From the questions we asked you at last conference we learned that when you ask a lot of people for their ideas, you should be prepared to receive a lot of ideas. We didn’t really anticipate on that.” Sounds like a given, but from experience we can tell you that, for many companies, it’s not.
After the introduction, the keynote speaker Younghee Jung showed us how Nokia connects to (offline) urban communities in their Nokia Open Studio initiative. This was a great reminder to all of us that we shouldn’t necessarily think of a community as an exclusively online group of people. Also, having a design background and having developed a similar method myself, I really liked seeing some pictures of real people using physical products.
Following, there were 10 minute talks by Arie de Zeeuw (Vodafone), Hans Zijlstra (KLM Club China and Club Africa), and Pim Betist (founder of Sellaband). At the end of each presentation, the speaker posed a question. When all three presentations were finished, the audience was split up in three equally sized groups, one for each of the presenting companies. These groups were asked to answer the question that the presenter put forward. The questions were;
- Arie: “What should Vodafone’s online strategy look like in the future?”
- Hans: “What can KLM do to improve the succes of Club China and Club Africa?”
- Pim: “Should Sellaband stay in their role as a facilitator, or should we also become a broadcaster?” (Note; being a broadcaster would entail they would try to promote a few selected artists with a larger audience)
These are all perfectly valid questions. So which of the speakers do you think received the most ideas from the audience? And, more importantly, why? The answer follows after the fold…
Building an innovative culture
The innovationtools website published a report titled “How do you build and sustain a culture and climate for innovation and entrepreneurship?”. The three main components they distinguish are:
- Giving innovators the time and space required
- Providing the right mix of diverse people on the innovation teams
- Fostering connections and relationships
These three points align with our experience, and the good thing is that they show that any company can be innovative! The ingredients for innovation don’t have to come from outside of the organization, but are available within. Giving time to innovators and supporting them with tools and training to make sure innovation processes are effective and efficient should provide a fruitful basis for innovation in any organization.
