Innovation Factory - Connected Innovation » PICNIC http://www.innovationfactory.eu Connected Innovation! Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:35:12 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 PICNIC ‘08 http://www.innovationfactory.eu/blog/2008/09/27/picnic-08/ http://www.innovationfactory.eu/blog/2008/09/27/picnic-08/#comments Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:07:38 +0000 Gyuri van de Bilt http://www.innovationfactory.nl/blog/2008/09/27/picnic-08/ 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.

PICNIC ‘08: OrangeIn this respect it was interesting to hear Minister Frank Heemskerk state a few hours later he had “no idea of what the result would be” of the Paint the World Orange contest. This contest was officially launched today and its goal is to make Amsterdam the global center of creativity and innovation.

Just before lunch, Loic Le Meur presented Seesmic, a service that can be described as a video based Twitter. Interesting is the (near) future option to have private conversations with groups of people – a feature that Twitter lacks. The service may therefore be interesting for organisations willing to privately interact with users.

After lunch Michael Chong (Ubercool) shared some trends that are here to stay, such as time compression and our unwired digital lifestyle. We seem to have become (un)wired control freaks, going to bed with our ‘lappy’ and sleeping 2 hours shorter than 80 years ago because we need the hours to be online! Regular entertainment isn’t good enough anymore (generation x-tasy), and we want to stay young by going to spa’s, brain training, botox and environmental care. These trends impact businesses continuously. Nestle for instance experienced a major impact on bottled water sales after the city of New York promoted the use of tap water!

During the next session Google’s newly appointed director of NBD (EMEA) Gisel Hiscock elaborated on how to be innovative. The nine Google rules of innovation show how important employees and their involvement are in creating new products:

PICNIC ‘08: Google
  • Hire the best
  • Everyone can contribute
  • Share all information (projects and even personal goals)
  • Everyone must understand your vision
  • Morph ideas, don’t just kill them
  • Speed matters (iterate)
  • Data, data, data: data drives all decisions
  • Users come first, money later
  • 20-percent time: employees are free to work on what they’re really passionate about

Gisel also announced the project10tothe100 idea challenge. Google will spend $10 mln on 5 ideas that create a better world.

In the next session Guy Laurence (CEO Vodafone NL) talks about the future of mobile. What struck me was his remark on the cost of adapting content for the mobile. Making a computer game available on a mobile phone sometimes costs more than the total initial development cost! Regarding the penetration level of mobile phones he was clear: “until now it was hunting (for new customers), now it’s about farming (stimulating use)”.

PICNIC ‘08: AmazonDuring the last session Werner Vogels (CTO Amazon) showed the computing power that Amazon has available for use by anyone. They offer their infrastructure in a way that allows for flexible growth. Large upfront investments in infrastructure are no longer necessary for growing companies. This would be a “waste of money” he states. Years ago Amazon clearly had to invest in infrastructure to deal with their traffic peaks. This led to the initial launch of these Amazon web services in 2002 which are now used frequently by start-ups. Throughout his presentation some interesting sites and services using Amazons platform are shared: Soocial, Vimeo, Jungle disk, and Wowza Media Server.

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