Faster Future: Possibilities now and beyond

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Make maps relevant: Redraw the world niche by niche

I like FourSquare. As a predominantly iPhone-using mobilist I find it user friendly and quite compelling.

The fact that colleague Laurence Borel is (was, heh heh) Mayor of 90:10 at 17 Percy St provides a great location-based nudge, for example (the more you check in at a location, the more points you accrue - you may even get to be Mayor... ah hem, I guess you have to be there).

I like the way tips can be delivered with both positive and negative power:

'ask for Joe he makes a mean cocktail'
'avoid the soup - it tastes like dishwater'

And I think there's a further two potentials likely to emerge. The first is for a wikifixing of venues and locations: A kind of brand tags.net for shops, bars, restaurants, offices, airports etc. (image via handmaps.org)

The second is an extraordinary potential to redraw the WHOLE map niche by niche (by each niche and for each niche) wresting control from the centre to the edge. It's our world, we should map it.

By following the emerging folksonomies FourSquare and those that will follow it (right up to and including ubiquitous augmented reality - Minority Report all around us) have the potential to disrupt the mass production version of the world - the one with a shared taxonomy on a centrally quality-assured (agreed) map.

These are two quite distinct plays: The brandtags version allows people to name a venue based on how they feel about it. The number of people who check into that location under its new title will indicate how much others agree.
In brandtags, consumers share keyterms for how they would describe a brand. On Foursquare if I label London's Kings Cross Railway Station, with, 'The Slough of Despond' it's likely a number long suffering commuters will check into The Slough.
A restaurant which serves bad food could get renamed by disgruntled diners and if others agree, the check-ins at Chez Crap will rise.

That's the crowd wikifixing individual locations then.

Then there's the greater opportunity of the long tail of mapping OUR multiple niche realities.

The maps we are used to are a view from the centre. They are an iconic example of a world view literally (super)imposed on us.

Buildings get given their official names - not the ones we use. I wonder if you can find Big Ben or The Pineapple on an OS map of London?

And those are just folksonomy terms everyone uses. How would the people in your office direct you to a nearby Thai restaurant? In the way a sat-nav would? Or like a human - 'just past the sandwich shop, opposite the pub and left past the bank'
Couldn't this kind of folksonomy be built in to deliver a world view (map) of shared usefulness to your particular niche? We would create maps of relevance with our own naming conventions and iconography.

Relevance always beats quality. You can have the most 'correct' map in the world, but if its icons and taxonomies mean little to me then I can't use it. We create meaning through our use in communities of purpose and in the context of our communities of purpose.

Great location based services and geolocation will enhance our experience of the physical world. Making our understanding of it more relevant for each community of purpose.

It's an important and symbolic example of the network disrupting anything that functions from the centre, out.

Now you can not only have your own world view, you can draw it and put a name to it.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Social Business Innovation Awards: Jan 2010 winner

We have a winner in the first Social Business Innovation Awards: January 2010. Securing 62% of the vote, the winner is...

Image via CrunchBase

BusinessCard2.

I haven't used it myself but... in a nutshell: LinkedIn taken beyond the silo.

It beat off better known (at least to me) challengers Twelpforce (2nd with 14%) and Local Motors (with 10%).

Check out all the January 2010 nominations here (along with the purpose of the awards).

If nothing else, January's vote has served to surface something new to me - and likely new to you too. We're discovering stuff we didn't know we needed to know about.

So BusinessCard2 becomes the first to enter our Social Business Innovation Hall of Fame. The process of selecting the next to join it will be started when we open nominations later this month for the February 2010 award. Please join in.

Here's BusinessCard2 co-founder Lief C Larson (of Workface Inc) on what makes BusinessCard2 a good example of social business innovation:

How our model works:
"Individual-level transparency is a major opportunity in the future of social business. We have created BusinessCard2, a service that helps professionals network and exchange business cards online without face to face interaction.
"Tens of thousands of users have created a card with us. The card acts as a web container that holds all the information that makes us digitally distinct: a utility to inform and educate. Customers and prospects use it to peer deeper into the great people behind the company. Fundamentally we believe business is about two people forming new connections.
"To help BusinessCard2 users reach more customers and prospects, we built unique technology that makes the card portable. For instance, those with a card can visit BusinessCard2-enabled websites and drop their card. BusinessCard2 was built to most closely mimic the process of sharing business cards in the real world, but as a process on the internet.

How social tools are used to innovate:
"BusinessCard2 is itself a social tool. It has been designed to provide portability beyond any singular walled garden social network. However, we have also implemented ways that BusinessCard2 can be shared in existing social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.
"From my perspective, business isn't just about those you all ready know (the current social network), but also about reaching out to those you don't yet know (the network potential). Our technology road map is focused on using the social infrastructure to build visibility within specific markets and help give our users the tools to form new connections.

Case study:
We are not focused on specific user case studies at this time. There are so many different use cases for BusinessCard2 that calling out specific instances does a disservice to it's potential. Rather, we are focused on how BusinessCard2 is incorporated into many different social situations: from social networks like Facebook, to high-traffic websites, to CMS (such as blogs, wordpress, etc.). I have a three minute video here that shows how to integrate BusinessCard2:

"I also have a brief video here that helps you understand what BusinessCard2 looks like.

BusinessCard2 on Social Business:
One of our core beliefs is that business is not just about companies, products, and services - but about meaningful connections between two people. At the organizational level, a company is defined as the sum of its parts.
"The parts are the people. We seek individual-level freedom and transparency at the professional level. We aspire to help power the autonomy of any person engaged in business to take their identity with them across the web. We hope to help help encourage social business by giving the public open access to the millions of incredible people behind the companies, products, and services we use every day.
"Each person who creates a BusinessCard2 has formed a social compact where they have complete control over their identity, and agree to expose that identity openly across the web. You do not need to log in to BusinessCard2 to view a person's card. Anyone with a BusinessCard can take their card anywhere they wish and share it freely."

Thursday, February 11, 2010

What does it mean to be a platform organisation?

I've been writing about the platform as primary organisational (and conceptual) framework pretty much as long as I've been writing this blog.

But I've never stopped to pull the essentials together.

What is a platform organisation? How does yours become one?

Let's start with a definition. Mine: A platform organisation uses its available resources to find, connect and support those who share its Purpose.

To be clear, I mean both within and without the organisation's own membranes. Those membranes must become permeable.

Of course, it does this with certain outcomes in mind. And to my mind these are they:

Why be a platform organisation?

Crowd-sourcing solutions offers three key benefits:

1. Value innovation: Access to more 'customer' minds in real-time increases the likelihood of 'blue ocean' solutions. These are those which seek to create new market space - where competition is irrelevant and benchmarking forgotten. Internal-only teams are more likely to default to tried and tested, me-too iterations delivering incremental efficiencies within current market confines. Value innovators look for things that customers value in common. Crowds deliver this. Then they ask: "what if we started anew?"
2. Better-fit solutions. Involving those for whom an outcome is intended in shaping that outcome results in a closer fit with their real needs. You make what you want; We make what we want.
3. Increased marketing and advertising efficiencies. Outcomes are more likely to be embraced by those who have played a part in creating them - the perfect start point for peer-to-peer advocacy.

There are others; You get closer to your customer; the customer feels they have skin in your game; you matter more to them; you get low-cost NPD, R&D, marketing, PR, advertising, customer support etc etc - but I think all these fall into the above three key reasons.

How to be(come) a platform organisation:

Start with the big why: Purpose. Platform organisations thrive on bringing people together to create best-fit outcomes but why would those outside your org want to join with you?
What is wrong with your industry, the way stuff gets done, how people are treated... the world... What is wrong with any of those things, that your org is out to put right?
Know this and express this through action. This is your first step to the Purpose-Driven Collaboration that platform organisations can share in.

Discovery and introduction:
Through expressing your purpose, and actively seeking those who share it, the latent community will emerge: those who care about the same stuff you do and who are willing to join you in working on it: communities of purpose. Join them, support them, contribute to them, provide for them. They were always there, the platform organisation's role is to discover and introduce them.

Community - groups
People join groups for three reasons:
1. Self-expression
2. To talk about the thing they care about
3. To fix the thing they care about.

Plenty of community tools enable 1 and 2. But 3 is too often disregarded. It is the key part. Social tools are not simply for connection, they are to enable outcomes that those people connecting care about. The platform organisation understands that 'social media' is 90% social, 10% media. It brings people together to make better stuff, not better messages.

Better messages are a necessary consequence of better stuff.

So ensure that their wikifixing contributions can be surfaced, acted on and the value created, shared.

It's nice to know that people are talking about you, saying nice things (or bad things) and where those things are being said. But much better to surface their concerns and join with them in addressing them - find ways for them to collaborate with you in fault finding and fixing and integrate that into work flows.

Systems which enable you to prioritise response and identify shared pinch points - from sophisticated conversation auditing to simple votes - offer some of the tools.

But the first step is to be open to collaborative change in the first place. And that starts in your head.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Why 'innovation' fails

Image via Wikipedia

There's a reason many a CEO views an offer to 'innovate' with a mixture of fear and disdain: Somewhere approaching 9 out of 10 business innovations fail.
There are lots of reasons:

(To summarise and plagiarise the Harvard Business Review (Jan/Feb 10) and Robert H Miles' Accelerating Corporate Transformation...)

Managers come over all conservative - what starts as a game changer ends up as a watered-down version of what it could/should have been.
No one gets given the space to change. Your team continue to be set the same old targets and have to deliver against the same responsibilities - yet are expected to layer on the new stuff alongside that very busy day job. They default to what they regard as the 'must do' rather than the 'important to do'. Their job descriptions don't get changed.
Then there's 'Initiative Gridlock' which loosely translates as 'what we're doing ain't good enough, but we'll keep on plugging away until we think of something better... only we never get time to think of anything better.' There's a great Einstein quote that the boardroom should keep in mind: "The definition of madness is repeating the same experiment and expecting different results."
It's easier to repeat than to change.
Innovation often fails in the implementation phase - because you didn't involve the people who you need on board to make it happen, in the process of shaping what it is that needs to happen.
That leads to its own set of issues - if the guys doing the implementation don't have the change in their soul their focus is going to be reduced and their efforts and the outcome blunted.

So lots of stumbling blocks to overcome. No wonder an innovation has just one chance in 10 of success.
But I do think there are ways of improving your chances AND overcoming those obstacles at the same time.
The first is not to equate innovation with incremental improvement. I always think of the image of the guy doing the Fosbury Flop for the first time. Real innovation is not a little bit better. It is not a repeat of the previous experiment, but bigger.

It is revolutionary.
I think the definition of Innovation from wikipedia re Signal Processing is helpful.

"the innovation is the difference between the observed value of a variable at time t and the optimal forecast of that value based on information available prior to time t.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation_(signal_processing)
In other words: "How much better could this thing be?"
How much better depends on where you look from. If you look at the issue from the perspective of the same old supply chains you have always analysed, and delivering with same set of resources you've always had to play with, you are almost certain to identify how incrementally better YOU can m

ake it. Small headroom.

But if you look at every aspect of that supply chain and imagine you have the global resource of all those who care about solving the same problem you face, then you can start to spot the revolutionary change you and the crowd can deliver TOGETHER. Big headroom.

You can either seek to innovate solutions using the resources you have at your disposal within the org, or you can seek to innovate solutions using all those resources PLUS the world outside.
I wonder how many of those failed 9/10 innovations tried to do it all on their own?

The truly innovative organisation sees itself as an connecting, enabling platform.

You can add. We can transform.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

One to watch: ThingLink.org

I don't often do a 'one to watch' these days. Everything moves so fast I'd rather just back the web.
But on this occasion I have been pointed at something by (twitter.com/willsh) that has significant potential and which I think you should explore: ThingLink.org

It's a social network for things and could play it's part in the emerging web of things in a very interesting way.

So far as I understand (and I have only just applied for a beta invite) it crowd sources the identification of objects and their relationship with other objects. The result is a social graph for a thing.

That could get very interesting. Imagine the Amazon 'People who like this also like this' extended to ALL objects? Real relationships identified and shared and multiplied; rather than market researched samples extrapolated until they burst.

Layer on real-time and location and some very complex relationships could be revealed as they emerge and as they create value.

A fascinating area to keep up to speed with. Hope you'll join me in trying.