iPlot

Embracing Openness

Rotman magazine, the print and online quarterly of the Rotman School of Management, has just released its new (Winter) issue, devoted to the theme “Open.” Openness has been a buzzword for a while, ever since Henry Chesbrough wrote his seminal book on Open Innovation, but, to apply Gartner’s Hype-Cycle terminology, now it seems as if Openness has finally reached a plateau of productivity after going through years of troughs of disillusion.

The Rotman issue is thus timely, and it is wise to (re-)frame the topic as “culture (and economy) of sharing,” as the foreword does:

“The fundamental rules that govern how relationships work between organizations and stakeholders are being rewritten: computation, storage and communication capacity – the basic means necessary to produce information, knowledge and culture – are now in the hands of every connected person worldwide (30 per cent of the world’s population of seven billion people.) The result: a culture of sharing powered by ubiquitous access to information that empowers stakeholders and demands radical transparency.

Unfortunately, many business leaders remain flummoxed in the face of stakeholders empowered by new tools that once seemed unimaginable: blogs, Facebook and Twitter, to name a few. Make no mistake, as your stakeholders become more adept at using these tools, they will demand that you become more open about your activities, and that you engage them in conversations that matter. With one billion new middle-class consumers set to enter the global economy in the next decade, the more you understand the new culture of sharing, the better off you and your organization will be.“

Amongst other contributions, the Openness issue features articles from management guru and Rotman dean Roger Martin and Wikinomics author Don Tapscott, as well as interviews with Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group and author of Open Leadership, and Linus Torvalds, the godfather of Linux. (Full disclosure, it also includes an article I originally wrote for design mind, “Openness or How to Design for the Loss of Control”).

Only if you’re open, you can share and be shared with. And if you share, you shall receive the greatest benefit, the greatest gift of all – someone else sharing something with you: their knowledge, their networks, their passion, their ideas. It is worth noting that the TEDGlobal conference 2012 – committed to sharing “Ideas Worth Spreading” – in Edinburgh will be held under the theme Radical Openness: “The world is becoming increasingly interconnected and open. Radically open – manifesting itself in open borders, open culture, open-source, open data, open science, open world, open minds. With the loss of privacy that it implies, openness carries its own dangers. But it breeds transparency, authenticity, creativity, and collaboration.”

My company, frog, is embracing Openness, too. We share our thinking with more than 330,000 followers on Twitter; more than 60% of our employees engage on Yammer in conversations that range from water-cooler topics to crowdsourced insights research firms would kill for; and design mind, the outlet you’re reading, is an open forum for all of our employees to publish their thoughts. We also recently launched SpeedMe, our own ‘speed-dating’ activity, to faciliate the bonding between new hires and ‘old frogs.’ In the words of our NY-based Associate Creative Director Dino Sanchez: “frog has grown quite a bit over the past year and with all our busy schedules it’s been difficult to keep up with new hires. Creativity is something that hinges on critique and in some cases brutal honesty, so knowing your colleagues and being comfortable with them is essential to a productive process.” Openness needs to be designed for.

At a the recent i7 Innovation Summit near Paris, frog ran a session at the beginning of the conference where we asked the conference attendees to break out into pairs and interview each other based on a questionnaire that we had prepared. Questions spanned the professional (e.g. “When was the last time you fired someone?” or “What was your biggest failure with the greatest learning?”) and the more personal (“What is your favorite movie?” – “What was your biggest lie”? etc.). The pairs had to fill in the answers in poster-size sheets which were subsequently mounted to a huge wall in the lobby, as a sort of “physical Facebook.”

David Rowan, editor of Wired UK, ran a similar exercise at WPP Stream in Athens, and in both instances the exercises were true ice-breakers for the attendees, forcing them to experience the implications of Openness first-hand: How open do I want to be? At what point does Openness become uncomfortable? What do I consider private in public? How much do I have to give in order to receive? Rowan argued that this kind of interactive, public data-mining would benefit any gathering as social interactions are typically more valuable when they’re facilitated by even a basic level of familiarity and trust among strangers. (On a related note, I’ve begun lately to ask job candidates to fill out the Proust questionnaire. Sure, professional qualifications matter the most, but at the end of the day you want to know who the person is you hire because chances are you’ll spend more time with them than with your own family.)

Yet pretending that Openness is just like any other business initiative that you can plan and execute would be disingenuous. It is a massive cultural change and requires a whole new mindset. The real challenges await the advocates of Openness after the first glitch, when things, very openly, go awry, and the conservative minds quickly come out of the closet to stigmatize one-time errors as systematic flaws. With every failure of Openness, the power of those who prefer Control rises exponentially. There is no doubt about it – openness, true, radical openness, hurts. It makes you uncomfortable, vulnerable, weak, and deprives you of the subtleties that came with control – but the benefits are huge. Pick the moments of Openness carefully: they will be your worst enemies and your best friends.

design mind - The Connective Issue

 
 

frog (formerly frog design), my company, just released the latest edition of its award-winning design mind magazine in a new, large broadsheet format. The seventh print issue of design mind (and its fourteenth overall) - "The Connective Issue" - investigates the theme of connectivity. With more devices tapped into the Internet than there are people on Earth, we are now more connected than ever. In more than 18 original articles, poster-sized infographics, and interviews with technology and cultural luminaries, The Connective Issue of design mind explores all the ways we come together: from a rare behind-the-scenes look at how Facebook, the world's most popular social network executes its design strategies to successfully connect almost one billion people online, to in-depth essays on how death, government transparency, and courtship are all being re-defined in the age of connectivity.

"How we connect to each other is often defined by what we do online, but connecting is so much more than that," says my colleague Sam Martin, editor-in-chief of design mind. "With this issue we wanted to explore how easy access to information and communication is affecting our analog lives, as well as our digital ones."

In addition to frog's designers, strategists, and technologists, special contributors to this issue include Allison Arieff, The New York Times columnist and former editor of dwell magazine, Atlantic associate editor Nicholas Jackson, and noted journalists James Nestor, David A. Greene, Nate Berg, and Michele Travierso.

Highlights include:

Facebook's Design Strategy: A Status Update: frog consulting editor Reena Jana goes behind the scenes of Facebook, revealing the rarely seen creative culture behind the social network that is approaching one billion worldwide users - and sparks many a debate on privacy and aesthetic issues.

The Tech Evolution: frog executive creative director David Merkoski sits down with author and visionary Kevin Kelly to discuss Kelly's theory that all of technology is an organism, with needs and wants of its own.

Go Ahead, Remake My Product: Atlantic associate editor Nicholas Jackson discusses why companies should embrace, rather than prosecute, hackers who illegally tweak their goods and services.

Single Nation: Shanghai-based writer Michele Travierso, contributor to The Economist, Monocle, and Wired, looks at how dating and marriage in China today is getting more complicated as the Chinese economy skyrockets and citizens pursue their love of commerce.

The Connected Company: Dave Gray, partner in the Dachis Group and founder of visual-thinking company XPLANE, views corporations as living ecosystems. Tech and the City: journalist Nate Berg explores how New York City's first chief digital officer, Rachel Sterne - and her counterparts in other metropolitan governments - are using social and other digital media to boost transparency and accessibility.

Networks to Neighborhoods: frog content and community manager Kristina Loring analyzes how everyday people are enhancing their relationships and productivity both online and offline, thanks to today's digital tools from Quora to Skillshare.

The End: writer and TV producer David A. Greene investigates what happens with our online selves when we die physically, and how death itself is finding a new identity in the Internet age.

Death and Beauty: created by award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, this map plots 2009 murders in San Francisco and tells a story of a city's disconnected neighborhoods-those of privilege and safety, and those of poverty and violence, in an elegant graphic.

You can check out The Connective Issue online or order the print issue here.

Enjoy!

India: Urgent Emergence

This was India’s year. Obama visited, as did Sarkozy, and many other statesmen of lesser political weight or star appeal. With an annual growth rate of close to 8.9% and foreign direct investments projected to exceed $100 billion, the booming Indian economy defied the global recession. For the first time ever, eight Indian companies made it onto the Fortune 500 global list. And even PR crises like the ill-organized Commonwealth Games and political corporate scandals that were an easy target for India’s cynical media did not eclipse the nation's staggering rise – in fact, these events just seemed to magnify the spotlight. Without a doubt, the sub-continent became ready for primetime in 2010, and to many outside observers a new confidence appeared to take hold of India’s economic and intellectual elite.

This year also marked my first visit to India. I had the privilege of assuming leadership for a team in Gurgaon (New Delhi), Bangalore, and Chennai, and to immerse myself in a country I had never been to before. I vividly remember the first five minutes after my arrival at Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi in September, the dusty air, the thick fog, the vanilla scented perfume tree in the car, and the calm driver whom I, for lack of any alternative, decided to wholeheartedly trust as he was racing me to my hotel amidst the polyphony of honks. Other countries are in your face or slowly creep into your soul with their mores, oddities, and sensations. India is around you, all the time. It is simple as the tourist cliché of itself (especially when you live in the airport-lounge-and-luxury-hotel bubble of the global business traveler) and yet complex as a vertical staggering of infinite parallel worlds which make sense each by themselves but fail to strike a consonant chord – like in the movie Inception.

When I attended the India Economic Summit in Delhi in November a few weeks after my first trip, jointly hosted (for the 26th time) by the World Economic Forum and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), President Obama had just passed through India, leaving an indelible mark on the Indian collective psyche with his now famous line that “India is not emerging, it has emerged.” The mood was bullish, if not exuberant, and many considered the visit a breakthrough moment for India. The economic reality had not changed but the awareness of the sheer scale of the opportunity ahead and the self-assurance that it might indeed be feasible to accomplish it, had moved to a whole new level, seemingly overnight. No wonder the optimism was palpable at the Summit.

The official theme was “Implementing India” but the actual theme that emerged during the three conference days was “Inclusive Growth” – how can India sustain its tremendous growth and at the same time narrow the social divide? While India’s growth numbers are impressive, many of the speakers acknowledged that its so-called “demographic dividend” (a term coined by Harvard demograph David Bloom) is a double-edged sword. By 2020 half of India’s population will be below 25, and it will account for 25% of the global workforce. But this demographic trend is unevenly distributed. India’s northern states, with their high fertility rates, are the main contributors to population growth (by 2025, the median age will be 26) whereas the south faces rapid aging (a median age of 34 by 2025). This means that “India’s demographic dividend is actually a double hump, one of which is already nearly exhausted,” Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekan writes in his seminal book Imagining India.

This “double hump” makes capitalizing on the remaining, “unexpensed” demographic dividend rather urgent. Experts foresee a demographic disaster unless India’s young workforce is properly skilled and employable by global standards. Unfortunately this is far from being the case today: For starters, 300 million people live in extreme poverty, that is, they live on less than one dollar per day, and 90% work in the informal economy. 70% of India’s 509 million-strong working population has not received a primary education, and only 11% of those aged 17-23 receive a higher education. India has the lowest education indicators among the G20 economies and the world’s highest number of illiterate people. One of the main challenges for India will be to create jobs for the 270 million people expected to enter the working-age population over the next 20 years. Will these people become the world’s workforce, as some predict, or the world’s worry?

Sustainable growth, many argue, will come from frugal (or reverse) social innovation, through public-private partnerships that scale at the base of the pyramid. It is well known that IBM has more employees in India than in any other country, and many of India’s big IT outsourcing companies (e.g. Wipro, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services etc.) have long been competing with multinationals. But no longer is India just the development center of excellence of the world or an emerging consumer market of massive scale; it is increasingly home to bottom-up innovations in areas such as energy, healthcare, and automotive, spurred by the urgency of structural change. Crisis has always proven to be a hotbed of innovation, and the need to improve the livelihood of a society is a powerful driver for entrepreneurship.

India is already the front of some radical product and service innovations such as the $3,000 car or the two cents per minute nationwide cell phone service. Moreover, with the deep penetration of low-cost telephony, the country’s emerging middle class could be a testing ground for the burgeoning mobile health (mHealth) technology market, in particular telemedicine and rapid diagnostic services. Globally, mHealth revenues are projected to grow by 25% annually, from $1.5 billion in 2010 to $4.6 billion by 2014. India is seeing many of its pioneering efforts, for example start-ups such as mDhil and eHealthpoints. The Indian healthcare industry, in general, is one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy, growing at 23% per annum.

A basic enabler of “inclusive growth” is to provide the rural population with access to information- and communication technologies and financial services. Although India is the second largest telecom market in the world and tele-density has increased to 56.6% in 2010, 44% of rural Indian households are still unwired, and of India’s 6,000,000 rural villages less than ten percent have a local bank branch. Microfinance, long heralded as an able solution to this shortcoming, has recently suffered a serious setback. The rapidly growing private microcredit industry faced imminent collapse when almost all borrowers in Andhra Pradesh, one of India’s largest states, stopped repaying their loans. Critics accused microfinance institutions of making “hyperprofits off the poor” by extending loans to poor villagers at exorbitant interest rates and without enough regard for their ability to repay. It will take some time for the industry to restore trust (and some more regulatory oversight from the state will help, too). But again, this crisis may spur much needed innovation in the Mobile Money space.

India’s villages are increasingly becoming a breeding ground for innovation, as its rural poor develop inventions out of necessity. Mansukhbhai Jagani, Mansukhbhai Patel, Mansukhbhai Prajapati, and Madanlal Kumawat, and three others are on a recent Forbes list of rural Indian entrepreneurs (compiled by IIM-Ahmedabad professor Anil K. Gupta) “whose inventions are changing lives” of the people across the country. Jagani developed a motorcycle-based tractor for India's poor farmers, which is both cost effective – costing roughly $318 – and fuel efficient. A farmer, Patel invented a cotton stripping machine that significantly cut the cost of cotton farming and revolutionized India’s cotton industry. Prajapati, a potter, invented a clay non-stick pan that costs Rs 100 and a clay refrigerator that runs without electricity for those who cannot afford a fridge or their electricity and maintenance costs. Madanlal Kumawat, a grassroots innovator with no more than a fourth-grade education, developed a fuel-efficient, multi-crop thresher that yields cleaner grains, which can be bagged directly and eliminates the cost of cleaning.

Design and design-driven innovation are quickly entering the business vocabulary here, too, and when I met with editors of business publications in Delhi a few weeks ago, their interest in design was as keen as their conviction that India will soon become a powerful innovation engine with global impact, propelled by a distinct national design style and a throng of young, ambitious, and fearless entrepreneurs. It will require a mix of national policy and education providing the economic framework, global design and innovation firms bringing quality standards and best practices to India, and – perhaps most importantly – Indian companies embracing design as a key differentiator and value-driver, with some quick and visible market successes.

Whether you’re strolling through Old Delhi or driving along the campuses of Bangalore’s IT firms, you can’t help but marvel at the tremendous pace with which the country and its people are happening. The whole country is on the move, which offers plenty of opportunities for upward social mobility but also disrupts traditional lifestyles and cultures. New high-rise developments for the burgeoning middle class (91 million urban households are projected to be part of it by 2030, up from 22 million today) stand in stark contrast to the poor villages right next to them, which are in the progress of upending their local identities and cultural roots. According to the United Nations Development program, it is expected that 41% of India’s population will live in cities by 2020, compared to less than 30% in 2010. That is 590 million people, nearly twice the population of the US today. A recent McKinsey report (“India’s Urban Awakening: Building Inclusive Cities, Sustaining Economic Growth”) estimates that 70% of net new employment will be generated in cities by 2030 and that 85% of total tax revenue will come from the urban economy.

Needless to say, that this migration will further contribute to stresses on the already insufficient infrastructure. McKinsey expects 68 Indian cities to have a population of more than one million by 2030 (up from 42 today vs. 35 in Europe). It warns that the current urban policy framework will lead to urban decay and gridlock. Today, India is investing eight percent of its GDP in infrastructure, which is a high number by international standards. And as much as $300 billion are forecast to be devoted to urban infrastructure over the next 20 years, a twofold increase in per capita spending of $17 today. But McKinsey believes that $1.2 trillion capital investments are necessary to meet the projected demand in Indian cities. The firm proposes fundamental city governance reforms to ensure these funds are not only raised but put to work efficiently. Unlike China, India cannot issue sharp policy shifts to appease a young population that may not be satisfied with the living standards of their parents. If urban policies fail, social upheaval, fuelled by underlying religious and ethnic divides, will likely be the result. Or as Nandan Nilekan puts it: “This is our biggest, but also our last chance.”

India is aware of its “moment” and understands that the window of opportunity for inclusive growth is limited. The government is seeking to balance the hustle, the frenzy, and the urgency with calm and confidence. It is the only possible attitude when you have to govern what seems to be genuinely ungovernable. I thought of a line from a song by Thom Yorke: “You have all the time in the world. Don’t squander it.”

[picture: painting by Vangobot. Vangobot is "a robot who paints with the soul of the human artists who taught him how to see."]

Disrupt and Disrupted - Notes from The Great Indian B2B Marketing Summit

I had the great pleasure of speaking at The Great Indian B2B Marketing Summit in Bangalore yesterday, organized by Jessie Paul, the former CMO of Indian outsourcing juggernaut Wipro, author of the book “No Money Marketing,” and founder of Paul Writer, a marketing consultancy cum hub that runs an influential online CMO Roundtable and other formidable programs to facilitate the exchange amongst the Indian marketing community. The program was quite an eclectic mix of topics, ranging from social media and digital marketing trends, to market development, to marketing leadership, to personal branding.

The two latter topics appeared to be the most popular, based on the audience’s response. Jessie herself provided a good overview of the main tenets of personal branding, and her session was a great reminder of the importance of creating a “personal brand map” to identify (following models by Geert Hofstede and Jim Collins) one’s “values, heroes, symbols, and rituals,” and derive one’s unique brand promise at the intersection of “passion, excellence, and profitability.” In addition to establishing personal thought leadership platforms tailored to the respective career level (entry-level execs may want to focus on processes, best practices, and creation; mid-level execs on opinions, forward-looking statements, HR issues, and organizational vision; whereas CXO execs typically address industry frameworks as well as macro-economic and policy issues), Rajeev Suri, CEO of Liqwid Krystal, offered some helpful advice for aspiring marketing leaders: 1. Stay close to the leadership; 2. Stay close to the money; 3. Never get into cruise control.

None of those are easy, and I can certainly empathize with Sangeeta Sundaram, head of marketing and communications at Capgemini India, who remarked that “marketing is notoriously over-stretched and under-resourced.” But then again, as Kiran Mani, head of industry sales for Google India, pointed out in his presentation: “Effective marketing does not have to cost much.” Jessie, with her penchant for “No Money Marketing," would agree, and ad agency executive Jon Bond goes even one step further, as quoted in a recent Fast Company article: "Marketing in the future is like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it."

While that is a perfectly viral line from a Twitter and SEO viewpoint and might cheer up some CMOs in light of dwindling marketing budgets, it of course posits an existential threat for advertisers and other marketing services firms. "Creating more work for less money is the big paradox," says Matt Howell, president of the Boston agency Modernista, in the same Fast Company piece that depicted a rather gloomy scenario for today’s Mad Men (“Mayhem on Madison Avenue”). Both client and agency side are facing a more and more strenuous battle for attention and engagement in the light of fragmented media usage, always-on connectivity, and social media: "The irony is that while there have never been more ways to reach consumers, it's never been harder to connect with consumers," explains Brad Jakeman, now chief creative officer at Activision, the gaming company.

No wonder new models are popping up left and right. Forrester calls for “Adaptive Marketing,” and the Harvard Business Review (HBR) recently ran a comprehensive report on “Social Media and the New Rules of Branding." In one of the report’s articles, McKinsey’s David C. Edelman suggests that marketers need to respond to today’s more nuanced customer journeys. Far from systematically narrowing their choices, Edelman argues, today’s consumers take a much more iterative journey of the three traditional customer journey stages: consider, evaluate, buy, and spend more time in the additional stages of enjoy, advocate, and bond. Edelman’s main revelation: If the bond becomes strong enough, consumers enter an enjoy-advocate-buy loop that skips the consider and evaluate stages entirely.

That all makes sense, but it strikes me as unlikely that tomorrow’s marketing innovation will come from reading a McKinsey piece in HBR. These days, domain expertise ages quickly, and doing is replacing saying. Marketers increasingly have to develop added-value ancillary products, services, and apps in order to sell their core offering. Traditional marketing is disrupted by disruptive marketing, which itself is disrupting interruptive advertising. Yet - in the best tradition of Clayton Christensen’s “innovation dilemma" - yesterday’s win can become tomorrow’s burden as disruptive viral campaigns are quickly absorbed by an army of me-too’s. Benchmarking, best practices, and new theoretical frameworks often just eclipse a lack of imagination, a lack of customer empathy, and a lack of courage to be creative: “There is no one to copy, no one to follow,” says Richard Branson.

And yet here I was at a marketing conference sharing my own playbook. Jessie had invited me to present on “What B2B Marketers Can Learn from Design-Driven Innovation for B2B,” and I definitely enjoyed my role as the somewhat eccentric outlier in the line-up. I was surprised how many people in the audience knew frog when I conducted a mini brand audit at the outset of my presentation, and I was flattered by their interest in frog. I took the attendees through a quick overview of frog’s history, philosophy, and approach, before elaborating on the seven design principles that I thought might be applicable for B2B marketers. The subsequent Q&A yielded some incisive questions, although, as usual, I wasn’t able to answer the “ROI of design” one satisfactorily. If anyone can, drop me a note. Oh well. Sometimes you just need to believe (or have a stellar sales team).

Here are the slides from my presentation:

What B2B Marketers Can Learn from Design-Driven Innovation

 

 

 

The Economist and the Human Potential

If TED is about “Ideas Worth Spreading,” then the Economist’s Ideas Economy conference series is – as the title would suggest – about ideas worth monetizing. It’s the Economist, stupid! The venerable publication, a notorious late adopter, has realized that despite solid market standing it must reinvent itself to survive, both through a suite of new digital products and by branching out into the conference business. The focus on Innovation (as in “a commercialized original idea,” as the excellent moderator Vijay Vaitheeswaran defined it in his opening remarks) is a natural fit: The Economist has always stood for liberal economic policies and liberal social values – which is typically the kind of fabric that innovation thrives in.

The most recent event of the series took place last week in New York: With the theme “Human Potential,” 250 business leaders, entrepreneurs, politicians, and academics discussed for two days how to foster and tap into the creativity and intellect of their employees, stakeholders, peers, and students. The cynic could object and ask “Do we indeed have potential?,” inferring that the term “potential” implies progress and betterment – but are we, humans, even good? And if so, can we get better?

According to Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, the answer is a clear yes. He presented a “history of violence,” arguing that violence is on the decline, which, as he readily admitted, appears to be somewhat counter-intuitive, knowing that there has not been a single day without war in the history of mankind. Attribute this to a recording bias: The magnifying effect of mass media makes violence more visible than ever before. Yet, Pinker cited empirical studies showing that the amount of actions which cause physical harm has steadily decreased over the past centuries. Despite the many atrocities it saw, the 20th century was not the most violent century in terms of absolute numbers (compared to the total world population), and acts of terrorism, Pinker pointed out, can only be described as (statistically) “insignificant.” Clearly, Pinker commented, the US overreacted in response to the 9/11 attacks. Before you cheer about the rise of human enlightenment and moral reasoning, however, consider that the way violence is committed may have become more subliminal, and that, more pressingly, weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a few rogue individuals (or states) can arguably do more harm nowadays - that is, cause ‘ultimate violence' - than ever before. Additionally, it remains difficult to project future trends based on historical data so that an overly optimistic, non-violent concept of human potential might be flawed because of a bias of retrospective. In fact, the Rational Optimist's great blind spot is that it cannot look into the “heart of darkness,” that it has no means to explain or forecast truly irrational behavior.

On top of that, it is, of course, particularly hard to assess the human potential when you are human. Is human potential limited to humans? Can humans really fully unleash their own potential or will it take artificial intelligence to do so? Were the attendees in New York able to realize human potential or rather its impediment? The conference, for the most part, stayed away from such provocations. Notwithstanding the occasional excursion into macro-economic or philosophical debate, most of the program was devoted to more pragmatic topics such as employee motivation, knowledge management, institutional and non-institutional learning, and creative thinking.

Like Pinker, Richard Florida struck an optimistic tone in his opening keynote, in which he heralded creativity as the essential resource of our societies. According to Florida, one third of the US workforce is employed in the creative sector, generating 50% of the overall wages. The unemployment rate has only gone up by 5% during the economic downturn, much less so than in other market sectors. Creativity, says Florida, is the key to economic recovery and the main catalyst of the “Great Reset” that he proposes. Asked about what he would tell the citizens of Detroit, he said “harness the creativity there,” claiming that “if we could turn 60% of services jobs into creative job we would boost the economy.” While that stood uncontested, his insisting on the metropolitan region as the hub of the “creative class” provoked more audience dissent in the subsequent Q&A. In the connected age of virtual worlds and social networks, the physical density of “idea people” seems to have lost some of its relevance. This is not to argue the importance of geographical talent clusters, but increasingly, innovation overcomes boundaries of space and happens whenever, wherever people meet (online). Geography is no longer destiny, and no longer does human potential start in cities, as Florida claims.

My colleague Robert Fabricant, VP of creative at frog design, who spearheaded a “social experiment” at the conference (more about that in another post soon), offered a less class-centric view on creativity. For him, creativity does not exist so much exclusively within an individual as it does between two entities: “Because that which is created needs a response to bring it to life.” He used the analogy of the old Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons to illustrate this collaborative creative interaction that is at the center of innovation.

The relationship between creativity and well-being, values and value, social purpose and money, self-actualization and economic success was the main theme of the conference. Jim Clifton, the CEO of Gallup, shared some remarkable insights, based on his institute’s annual survey on “what does the whole world want?” This time, the majority of respondents said: “A job” – in stark contrast to previous years when the answers had ranged from “a happy life,”and “family,” to “health.” The responses this year shifted the focus to the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. Why is that? First of all, the inequality between the rich and the poor is growing, and it is no surprise that many living in developing countries consider “finding a job” an existential need. Secondly, the growing middle class (in India and China, and other emerging markets) has become much more aware of its possibilities and views employment as the main enabler of a brighter future for themselves and their families, one that often includes better education and increased consumerism. And then, well, there was the recession in the developed world - and its lasting implications.

So are we seeing a renaissance of materialism? Does money beat meaning? The final debate of the conference, conducted in classic Oxford-style, looked at this conflict through the veneer of employee motivation. Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute and entrepreneur Lynn Tilton, CEO and principal of Patriarch Partners, contended that “money motivates more than social purpose.” The two were facing formidable opponents in Clay Shirky (author of Cognitive Surplus) and Dan Ariely (author of The Upside of Irrationality), who argued that social purpose was the more powerful motivator. The pro faction – albeit perhaps exhibiting more passion – ran out of arguments soon and could eventually only help itself by evoking the Nazis (Godwin’s Law posits that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1. In other words: all discussions - regardless of topic or scope - inevitably end up being about Hitler and the Nazis.") Brook and Tilton’s mechanistic concept of human behavior was easily rebutted by Shirky and Ariely, who insisted that money is always only a substitute of meaning,refering to Wikipedia, Lego, and other examples of meaning-driven engagements. “Money can motivate your employees to show up,” Ariely said, but if you want them to not just show up but commit with their full creative and intellectual potential, you need to motivate them with non-monetary incentives.”

This view was echoed by Cristóbal Conde, president and CEO of IT services company Sungard, who endorsed transparency and called “creating a platform for collaboration” the most important task of today’s business leader. It didn’t matter that he almost literally borrowed his own words from an interview with the New York Times earlier this year – they still rang true. “Collaboration is one of the most difficult challenges in management. I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.” Conde said further: “The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.” Conde: “Micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability.” Sungard uses enterprise micro-blogging service Yammer to enhance internal knowledge sharing: “It has given our employees a voice.”

With CEOs like him, the company is not a 20th century idea: “The more I teach, the more I learn," Conde said. Humility, openness, and collaboration are the hallmarks of a new kind of humanistic organization, led by humane leaders. That’s an idea worth spreading – and monetizing.

Openness or How Do You Design for the Loss of Control?

 

Openness is the mega-trend for innovation in the 21st century, and it remains the topic du jour for businesses of all kinds. Granted, it has been on the agenda of every executive ever since Henry Chesbrough’s seminal Open Innovation came out in 2003. However, as several new books elaborate upon the concept from different perspectives, and a growing number of organizations have recently launched ambitious initiatives to expand the paradigm to other areas of business, I thought it might be a good time to reframe “Open” from a design point of view.

What sparked my interest in particular was the Dachis Group’s list of Six Social Business Trends to Watch which referenced the phrase JP Rangaswami coined at this year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference: “Design for the loss of control.” His point was more IT-specific, arguing that the combination of pervasive digital infrastructure, software-as-a-service, cloud computing, social software, and smart phones have enabled employee- and customer-driven solutions to a degree that renders top-down IT systems obsolete. As Dion Hinchcliffe of the Dachis Group writes: “Enterprises currently expend considerable resources trying to impose control on a situation that increasingly appears like it not only can’t be controlled, but almost certainly doesn’t need to be.”

No longer in control

The new paradigm Hinchcliffe describes has implications far beyond just IT. For one thing, employees, who are facing an increasingly hybridized work/life proposition, are eager to do what they are passionate about, and they will increasingly find the digital spaces and tools that allow them to do this most effectively without having to ask anyone for permission. Companies have to come to terms with the fact that the traditional model of managerial resource allocation and coordination (mainly coerced through extrinsic motivation in the form of rewards and punishments, such as payments, promotions, demotions, etc.) has become outdated and no longer reflects the social fabric of today’s workforce.

Moreover, customers, too, seek out relationships with brands that go beyond the merely transactional. Empowered through ubiquitous access to information and therefore radical transparency, through an abundance of choices on the web, as well as the ability to contribute and tap into social networks (and thus social capital) in real-time and on-the-go, they expect brands to offer engagement and collaboration models that match the more distributed and multi-layered mechanisms of value creation through social media.

Commitment is fickle, reputation volatile, and loyalty scarce. In short: Companies have lost control – over their workforce, their customers, and as a result, their brands. Or, more precisely, as Charlene Li points out in her book Open Leadership, they have never really been in control – what they are actually forced to give up now is their need for control.

The power of pull

So what can they do besides just bemoaning this loss and passively observing how the new centrifugal forces of the Social, Real-Time Web are disrupting their traditional business and engagement models? Li lays out how business leaders can and (must!) embrace the new rules of openness. John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, in the The Power of Pull, provide an actionable framework for how these new forces can be leveraged through “shaping strategies” on the individual, institutional, and societal level.

These “shaping strategies,” as the term suggests, present an exciting challenge for design. If designers embrace the insight that influence is replacing authority as the new currency in the “pull economy” and that the best way to gain influence is to give up control, they will have significant impact on how this new economy is shaping up. In fact, they are uniquely positioned to develop what Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison call levers of “access, attraction, and achievement” that provide the “creation spaces” and tools for employees and customers alike to design their own destiny, create their own meaning, and thus convert their very own skills and passions into productivity and loyalty.

In essence, businesses can use “shaping strategies” to amplify and accelerate the inevitable loss of control in order to avoid employees and customers abandon them. This may sound counter-intuitive but the upside is considerable. A deliberately designed loss of control grants companies the only remaining and arguably most critical competitive advantage – access. As long as they enable and facilitate knowledge flows, ideas, passions, skills, and experiences, they have access to them. In fact, if they fully leverage the “powers of pull,” these assets will gravitate towards them.

X-problems and social networks

Openness is no longer just a nice stunt but a fundamental requirement for any business that wants to thrive in the new “pull economy.” Because we’re increasingly dealing with "X-Problems," as my colleague Adam Richardson reckons in his book Innovation X, we need approaches that allow us to come up with creative solutions to problems we may not even know yet. In other words: Solutions that help define the problem. Or as Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison put it: “If you want to find out what it is you don’t know that you don’t know, you need to hang out with other people who might already know it.”

The loss of control enables the creation of more weak ties in a company’s network (inside and outside of the organization), and, as social network research has shown, weak ties are more conducive to transporting foreign ideas, knowledge, and skills – because they move faster from one node to the other as the network becomes more accessible and nimble on its fringes. The further you get away from the core of your network, the less control you (may want to) have.

You could argue that designers have been designing creation spaces, feedback mechanisms, and other participatory experiences for some time now. They certainly have, but perhaps without fully recognizing or deliberately orchestrating the amount of loss of control that their designs represented. It seems like the time is ripe to understand these efforts as part of a broader shift and consolidate them into a series of formats that, going forward, shall serve as blueprints for “design for the loss of control,” across different corporate functions and disciplines.

Frequently, these solutions will involve de-institutionalizing decision-making by removing the intermediary. In many cases, this may imply an act of democratization, but it is also important not to see this as a zero-sum game. Control is not just shifting from one hand to many; rather, it is dissolving and defragmenting and along the way diminishing – or turning into something else, far more valuable: social capital that resides in the public domain and is no longer controlled by anyone. The formats that propel this new mode of collaboration and value creation are emergent and informal, and they typically carry a significant amount of tacit knowledge.

Here are some recent examples:

Open ideation/crowdsourcing: Open ideation (or crowdsourcing) is based on the assumption that the best ideas for new products, services, and business models may come from outside of your organization or from those people inside your organization who are typically (by function or hierarchy) excluded from the ideation process. Like all open innovation efforts, crowdsourcing redistributes control from an elite group of thinkers and doers to a broader group of self-selected participants. By broadening the funnel, companies can harness the accumulated or aggregated knowledge of these voices. Crowdsourcing is usually focused on ideas and insights but can also cover a wider array of collaborations with external parties throughout all stages of the innovation cycle. Dell, Starbucks, P&G, and many other organizations use crowdsourcing. Nike partners with Creative Commons and Best Buy for GreenXchange, a platform that promotes “the creation and adoption of technologies that have the potential to solve important global or industry-wide sustainability challenges.” TED is expanding its reach through TEDx, “independently organized TED events," without compromising the exclusivity of its brand. Furthermore, Victors & Spoils brought crowdsourcing to the world of advertising; and IDEO recently launched its crowdsourcing platform, OpenIDEO, inviting the public to join “creative challenges” that tackle social issues through design. And there are firms such as InnoCentive that specialize in crowdsourcing services for other companies. All these companies not only make ideas accessible to more or less open publics (to some extent, giving up control over IP) but also commit to making the follow-up on these ideas (at least partially) transparent (giving up some control over agenda-setting and strategic planning).

Open design research: frogMob, developed by frog design, is a tool for crowdsourced design research, based on the idea that everyone can be a researcher for a day, just by paying a little more attention to the world around them. frogMob uses guerilla photography and stories to take a quick pulse on global trends, behaviors, and artifacts. Launched internally first – tapping into frog’s eight global studios – we are now expanding frogMob to a broader public. Through frogMob, we are able to “mobilize” not only our internal network around a specific assignment but also external contributors on an ad hoc basis, in a short amount of time (like a Flash Mob). frogMob allows us to provide lightweight, rapid design research for clients who ask for a “trend scrape” that identifies patterns and offers unexpected inspiration. The key here is to tap into existing knowledge flows - in a nimble way that does not require too much commitment from the participants and eliminates bureaucratic hurdles.

Open strategy: Crowdsourcing can also take place as a combination of online and offline collaboration, as demonstrated by NPR and its Think-In on the future of digital media. Supported and facilitated by frog, NPR hosted an open strategy session, bringing together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations. The Think-In harnessed the collective expertise and creativity of an exceptional group of entrepreneurs, executives, and innovators, and it developed concepts that NPR incorporated into its organizational roadmap. The event was augmented through live-commentary and streaming via various social media channels. This social augmentation made the workshop accessible for a broader audience, which – like the on-site participants – felt so genuinely passionate about NPR that they committed some serious time to this collective brainstorming. Such passion for brands could also be put to work through a more radical version of a Think-In: a “brand hijack” that convenes customers and other interested parties to explore new directions for a brand – yet with the twist that the brand itself would not participate (but may have the option to co-opt the results of the session afterwards).

Open-source humanitarian software: In the software space, open-source projects have long been an established form of open innovation, see IBM’s Eclipse platform. Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), founded by teams from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank, uses open-source methods to “hack for humanity.” It describes itself as a community of “developers, geeks and tech-savvy do-gooders around the world, working to develop software solutions that respond to the challenges facing humanity today.” The group runs “Hackathons,” inviting the best and the brightest hackers from around the world, who volunteer their time to tackle disaster relief issues with through software applications. The Hackathons are designed as so-called “codejams,” fast-paced competitions that give the participants a set amount of time to solve the challenges they are given. At the end of a two-day marathon of hacking, a panel will review each hack, and the winners will walk away with prizes, as well as the right to call themselves “RHoKstars” ever after. Another example of open-source humanitarian software is Ushahidi’s CrowdMap which displays crowdsourced crisis data on maps as a free cloud-based service.

Open-(source) social networks: Lockheed Martin, the giant defense contractor, built its own networking site called Eureka Streams and released it open-source for the public to use. As Fast Company writes in a recent blog post, “The company's management had recognized that an internal social networking tool could have all sorts of procedural benefits for a large, and geographically disjointed organization. Essentially it lets ‘knowledge workers’ inside the company find and talk with other experts who may have valid input to particular projects, but who would otherwise have zero oversight or input.” Dow Chemical is another example of a company setting up its own social network, in this case to help managers identify the talent they need to execute projects across different business units and functions. Dow has even extended the network to include former employees – a smart move. Closed networks are of diminishing value. A recent McKinsey Quarterly report argues, “In the longer term, networked organizations will focus on the orchestration of tasks rather than the ‘ownership’ of workers’ and advises executives to ‘make the network the organization.’”

Open branding: In the spirit of transparency, design firm Continuum is partly revealing to the public its creative process. The specific challenge is to create a brand identity for the Design Museum Boston, a nomadic institution that exhibits mainly in the virtual space. For six weeks, Continuum is partnering with Core77 on a blog series that will reveal the firm’s process and progress as it takes on the challenge. Readers are invited to comment but it is not quite clear to what degree they can influence the creative work. It’s a non-commercial client and a low-risk project but in any case, making a creative project transparent – even somewhat haphazardly – is an interesting experiment that is worth following. The more radical experiment would of course be to put the creative control over a project fully in the hands of the “smart crowd” and have the creative team steered by a disperse group of “remote creative directors”- beyond just input comprising of insights and ideas. Other, more radical formats are imaginable: For example, sharing a company’s entire communications (some, more or less tightly managed corporate Twitter accounts are in a way a precursor to this) with the public. This would be radical transparency indeed, and an experiment with unpredictable outcome – will the benefit of enabling reciprocal, collaborative relationships outweigh the risk of reputational landmines and IP violations? Is it IP, in the end, as proprietary “knowledge stocks” (The Power of Pull), that serves as a company’s greatest asset or isn’t it rather the ability to attract talent and grant access to knowledge and skills? There’s another, softer benefit to it: Brand personality comes from being personal. The more transparent and the more vulnerable brands are, the more personal, they more authentic they will appear. Transparency is a prerequisite for authenticity – an unmasked and immediate act of communication.

Open social-capital enablers: Small, ad-hoc, start-ups are popping up that leverage the principles of self-organization, which Clay Shirky so aptly described in Here Comes Everybody, to rethink “capital” and reinvent human resources allocation in order to tackle global issues. Originated from the Sandbox network, an exclusive network of young innovators and entrepreneurs under 30, this movement calls itself “Emergent Transformation,” and Max Marmer, one of its masterminds, writes on its group blog: “Lately we have been observing an accelerated movement of ventures that are revolutionizing how we take initiative on a global scale. They can be mostly found in the areas of education, innovation, collaboration, networks, entrepreneurship, and human development: spaces that most likely will dominate the future of value creation in our society. These ventures are leveling the global resource play, unleashing unused & undeveloped human capital and leading to a socioeconomic transformation.” For example, there is Supercool School, an online school platform that strives to give people worldwide access to education by building a new global infrastructure of live online schools. Or Assetmap, an online platform that helps individuals discover and leverage resources directly from the community around them, using the methodology of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD). Max Marmer believes “One huge differentiator that sets these projects apart from almost all other organizations is their emphasis on ‘human potential’ or ‘social capital,’ rather than economic capital. The hope is that by creating a clearly defined space for these organizations to work in, there will be more opportunity to share this social capital, allowing them to achieve complimentary aspects of mutually shared visions. Their aspirations are tied to value creation, based on co-operative contribution, and will allow them to fulfill personal passions. Giving new meaning to their work, it’s helping people lead happier lives.”

Open conferences: Un-conferences are facilitated, face-to-face, participant-driven conferences centered on a specific theme or purpose. They are the antidote to the conventional conference format, radically disrupting the delineation between curator and attendees, speaker and audience. The attendees are the experts. Many organizations and groups have begun to use un-conferences to capture and externalize the full breadth of expertise assembled at conferences. Some conferences prefer to incorporate only some un-conference formats into their program – participant-driven sessions that are developed on site in real time.

Open conversations: Modernista did it. Skittles did it. And ad shop Crispin Porter + Bogusky did it. All of them use their corporate web sites as social hubs that curate what is being said about their brand rather than staging what their brand has to say. These efforts are attempts to at least co-opt the conversation on the Social Web before brand-specific aggregators could benefit from being parasites of the brand's social universe. In other words, what if a brand faced unexpected competition from a third-party site that provided a much more comprehensive and easier-to-access curation of Skittles conversations than the brand itself? Or if McDonalds suddenly saw itself confronted with a site aggregating blogs, videos, news, and tweets, all about but not by McDonalds? Think of this as the logical extension of the company profiles that already exist on LinkedIn and Glassdoor.com, which aggregate individual member data into a fairly transparent view of companies, including employee information, salary information, and recent news. Indeed, third-party brand curators might realize that brands live in the ‘social commons,’ and that whoever builds the right aggregation mechanism and establishes the most popular channels to reach a mass audience will “own” the branded conversation on the web. Take a look at how Get Satisfaction’s “community-empowered customer support” plays this – it is not an uncontroversial model, but it is “designed for the loss of control (of brands),” enabling customer-to-customer service. You could also spin the idea of a “social homepage” a bit further and not only curate the social web conversation about your brand but actually give away your whole homepage to third parties and to public service announcements, stories, or art. Give up control – gain social currency.

Open HR: Of all critical business functions, HR might be the one with the greatest potential for innovation. With dynamic, quickly accessible expertise replacing static piles of proprietary knowledge, and companies moving from organization-centric to network-centric modi operandi, HR becomes a key enabler of assets through the nurturing of relationships, developing talent, and fostering a culture of openness and participation. This is not just pep talk but includes new tools and methodologies that radically alter the relationship between employee and firm. A recent study by Birkman International that surveyed nearly 20,000 HR professionals found that 83 percent of respondents see great potential in social media-based HR solutions, particularly when it comes to improving communication, learning, and knowledge sharing. Here at frog design, we have launched frogForward, an open-ended, conversational, and social performance management app that allows our employees to provide 360-degree feedback any time throughout the year (not just during review cycles). Goal-setting is entered as a stream, and the feedback – peer, managerial, and employee feedback – can be shared openly or privately. This new approach reflects the changing realities of work performance, from a task-driven control and coordination approach with quantifiable goals to a holistic view that is more situation-and context-aware, gives the employee significantly more control of the process, and considers intangibles such as tacit knowledge, social intelligence, and relationship-building. frogForward shares this approach with Rypple, an ad-hoc social network that provides simple, direct, anonymous, and ongoing customer and employee feedback.

All of these initiatives, whether they apply to brand, CRM, product development, R&D, customer service, or HR, exhibit some similar characteristics:

- easy access;

- open platforms that harness the creativity and expertise from people outside of the organization or untapped sources inside;

- open-ended formats that can evolve as the problem statement changes;

- ample room for participation and emergent self-organization;

- easy mechanisms for tinkering and hacking (e.g. through open-source formats);

- small formats that can be easily shared

- strong incentives (ideally intrinsic motivation or social currency);

- real-time visibility (through sharable content);

- tie-ins to dormant or active social networks;

- and distributed decision-making.

Openness as permanent crisis

There is another aspect to this: The most imminent and urgent manifestation of “loss of control” is of course a crisis. And in times where terrorism, financial downturns, natural disasters, as well as catastrophic events on the individual level are a steady companion to our societies and personal lives, designing for crisis has become a default skill, forcing designers to make contingency planning an integral part of the experiences they create. Often, this means developing exit scenarios that are flexible enough to provide a structure for emergent solutions in response to emergencies. (The notion that architects design spaces so they can be escaped from has been thoroughly examined by Stephan Trueby in his book Exit-Architecture - Design Between War and Peace). In other words: an easy way out. And in. Because exits are entry points as well. If you design ways out of the system, they might as well serve as ways into the system.

If you think about it, this insight may provoke a different notion of openness – understanding it as a system where exit and entry are identical. In this line of thinking, an ecosystem on the Social Web could be seen as a system in permanent crisis – it is always in flux, and its composition and value are constantly threatened by a multitude of forces, from the inside and the outside. What if we understood “designing for the loss of control” as designing for structures that are in a permanent crisis? Crises are essentially disruptions that shock the system. They are deviations from routines, and the very variance that the advocates of planning and programs (the “Push” model) so despise. At their own peril, because they fail to realize that variance is the mother of all meaning; it is variance that challenges the status quo, pulls people and their passions towards you, and propels innovation. “Designing for the loss of control” means designing for variance.

One system in permanent crisis that contains a high level of variance is WikiLeaks. The most remarkable thing about the site appears to be the dichotomy between the uncompromised transparency it aims at and the radical secrecy it requires to do so. The same organization that depends on the loss of control for its content very much depends on a highly controlled environment to protect itself and keep operating effectively. But not just that: Ironically, secrecy is also a fundamental prerequisite for the appeal of WikiLeaks’ “there are no secrets” claim. Simply put: there is no light without darkness. And there is no WikiLeaks without secrets.

Applied to systems and solutions design, this means that total openness is the antidote to openness. When everything is open, nothing is open. In order to design openness, one of the first decisions designers have to make is therefore to determine what needs to remain closed. This is a strategic task: making negative choices for positive effects. You need to build enough variance into a system to make it “flow” and yet retain some control over the underlying parameters (access, boundaries, authorship, participants, agenda, process, conversation, collaboration, documentation, etc.). Only if you maintain the fundamental ability to at least manage (and modify) the conditions for openness, will you be able to create it. To design for the loss of control, control the parameters that enable it.

These are just some initial thoughts. What other formats and business models can you think of that “design for the loss of control” to everyone’s benefit and increased social value? What other variances can be created and effectively shaped? What design principles must be applied?

Over to you.

Digital Innovation Workshop for Germany’s Largest Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung

“Journalism is not a profession anymore, it’s an activity,” I heard someone say at a conference in Paris a few weeks ago. Assuming that’s indeed the case – with news breaking on Twitter, commentary provided by popular bloggers, and both distributed via aggregators and social networks – you can imagine newsrooms becoming panic rooms, and the gatekeepers of the public turning into the horsemen of the apocalypse in private.

The profession’s common objection to the burgeoning social web paradigm is “We may all be publishers, but we’re not all editors.” But that claim can be easily countered: Do we still need editors? “If the news is important, it will find you,” asserts Marissa Mayer of Google, and she refers to the emergence of hyper-personalized (maybe also hyper-local) news streams that you can opt into without an intermediary and that come to you via one of the myriad social channels. Just one data point: In January 2010, visitors to nytimes.com spent an average 14 minutes on the site, whereas Facebook users stayed on Facebook.com for an average of seven hours. This begs the question of what’s more important to the newly empowered news consumer: Speed or credibility? Social aggregation or expert curation? Location-based delivery or correspondents on location?

Moreover, content farming (i.e. Demand Media) and other forms of on-demand journalism (i.e. Spot.Us) are fundamentally challenging the agenda-setting oligopoly of traditional media. Then there is the rise of the Mobile Internet: A recent Morgan Stanley report forecasts that it will have outgrown the Fixed Internet by 2015. And of course there is now the iPad and other tablets.

The future of journalism will be social and mobile, whether you like it or not, and it might likely require cross-platform storytelling. Consequently, news organizations are not only rushing to launch tablet versions, they are also shifting their expectations towards reporters: “Aggregating and curating content with attribution should become part of a BBC journalist’s assignment; and BBC’s journalists have to integrate and listen to feedback for a better understanding of how the audience is relating to the BBC brand. If you don’t like it, if you think that level of change or that different way of working isn’t right for me, then go and do something else, because it’s going to happen. You’re not going to be able to stop it.’” Said Peter Horrocks, Director of Global News, BBC.

In light of all these trends, innovation is no longer an extracurricular activity for newspapers; it has become a mandatory task for rescuing the profession of journalism. “Innovate or die” seems to be the only real option. Or, put more mildly: If newspapers don’t just want to age (and ultimately die) with their traditional readership, how do they render themselves relevant for future readers, that is, the generation of digital natives, and their vastly different media consumption habits? (see the random sample of interviews below, polled on the streets of Munich: “How do you receive your news?” – in German).

The good news is that the future of journalism doesn’t have to look all that grim. Every abundance creates scarcity, and for every asset given away for free there are assets for which you can charge. Whether these assets will still be content, well, that’s another question – one of the many questions we asked in an all-day digital innovation strategy workshop that frog held last week at the headquarters of Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest newspaper, in Munich. The paper is read throughout Germany by 1.1 million readers daily and boasts a high circulation abroad. Attendees of the workshop included, among others, the paper’s managing directors as well as the managing editors of the print and online newsroom (which are – unlike at many other news outlets – still separated at Sueddeutsche). The discussion was animated, critical of buzzwords and easy solutions, with lots of food for thought for both sides, and ultimately very encouraging.

With its stable circulation and ad revenue, its strong brand, and its immense popularity both among readers and journalists (Germans call it a “Leitmedium” – an agenda-setting publication that in recent surveys was even ranked ahead of the venerable SPIEGEL in terms of “authority”), Sueddeutsche Zeitung is uniquely positioned to view the digitization of content and the transformative principles of the social web less as an existential threat but a historic opportunity to reinvent journalism.

Re:Publica 2010: "Innovation By 10"

My talk from the Re:Publica 2010 conference in Berlin is now live. Titled "Innovation By 10," it presented 10 observations, provocations, insights, and questions on the elusive topic of innovation, based on 40 years of frog design and my 4 years with frog design. Note: it's in German.

Naked Germans + Disruptive Innovation + Cloud Computing, #ashtag Style

This has been a strange week.

First of all, I had the pleasure to speak at re:publica in Berlin, perhaps the most political of all web conferences. The gathering, now in its 5th year, has evolved from a forum on digital governance to a somewhat unique and truly German hybrid of deep philosophical discourse (about the role of the individual in the digital space) and hands-on advice for practitioners. It felt a little bit like going back to college while working in a start-up. Intellectualism with street cred.

No wonder What Would Google Do-author Jeff Jarvis (a skeptical German newspaper called his thoughts “radical but not always sound” – ha!) was in his element. In his keynote – “Privacy, Publicness, and Penises“ – he elaborated on the “German Paradox,” wondering how a society that embraces mixed-gender saunas (and titles such as the one of his talk), even given all historical reasons, is still so utterly fixated on the defense of privacy on the web (going after Facebook and Google Street View; enabling convicted killers to expunge their names from Wikipedia; vehemently objecting to airport body scanners, etc.). In his eyes, “the issue is not privacy but control: We have a right to control our information and how it’s used. But all this talk about privacy could make us withhold more than ever; it could make us downright antisocial.” He argues that a collective revealing, with transparency as the norm, is the prerequisite of value creation: “In the company of nudists, no one is naked.” Value comes from sharing. It is not privacy, it is the public we must defend.

Of course, Jarvis, the Google fan boy, is way too smart to overlook the Achilles’ heel of his argumentation: Yes, the issue is control, not privacy, but how much privacy is there left to control if Google – granted, as the big enabler of publicness – owns our data? Thus, the big question for Jarvis and the rest of us is not so much “What Would Google Do?” but “What Will Google Do” (with all our data)?

My own talk, as part of a session titled “Innovators by the Fire,” was more mundane. Asked to illustrate the transformational power of design, I shared ten deliberately critical observations, insights, provocations, and questions on innovation, citing cases from the inevitable Apple (which just ranked again at the top of Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s 50 Most Innovative Companies) to Cirque du Soleil. I defended the thinking behind design thinking while arguing against its all-too-catchy "magic formula," and linked disruptive product innovation to viral marketing (more on that in another post soon).

What I was not aware of on stage was the irony of the moment. As I was talking about disruptive innovation, the real-time world had, just minutes before, plotted a disruption of historic proportions, a highly original twist that overshadowed the digital landscape, quite literally, with a very physical cloud. In fact, the volcano eruption in Iceland made the conference theme – “NowHere” – appear more timely than intended. With the air traffic over Europe coming to an abrupt halt and thousands of travelers stranded, the vision of “anytime, anywhere” suddenly seemed nostalgic. No one was going anywhere anymore. At least, the digerati, limited in their usual nomadism and stuck at airports all over Europe, gave Cloud Computing a new creative dimension, coming up with “ashtags” and other memorabilia proving that humor indeed means laughting in the face of the catastrophe – which is all the more valuable, to Jarvis’ point, if it’s shared to mutual comfort.

At least the Norwegian prime minister restored our trust in innovation and digital technology’s omnipotence as he rose to Internet fame by demonstrating how to swiftly govern his country from his iPad.

Strange days – but that’s why we’re here for anyway, no?

Here's my deck:

Innovation By 10

View more presentations from frog design.

NPR and frog design Host Digital Think-In to Explore Future of Public Radio

"NPR is a brand to die for," as a colleague of mine said. Enjoying the authority of a well-established public media vanguard with a broad and extremely loyal listenership, it has also managed to become an agile innovator that is embracing (and even pioneering) the new rules of the digital era of broadcasting. NPR's social media footprint is constantly widening, its API much acclaimed, and its recent iPhone app has already surpassed that of the New York Times and other news outlets in terms of popularity.

It is thus not surprising (but still absolutely commendable) that NPR is experimenting with further opening its brand and in fact holding a full-blown digital strategy session in the public limelight, as it did this Friday with the NPR Digital Think In in San Francisco. I was priviliged to be involved in the planning and organization of the event, on behalf of my employer, frog design, which co-hosted the event. We facilitated the workshop sessions, provided our studio facilities, and also helped NPR connect with key thought leaders from the Bay Area tech and design communities.

The Digital Think In brought together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations. Hosted by NPR CEO and President Vivian Schiller and Digital Media SVP and General Manager Kinsey Wilson, the Think In harnessed the collective expertise and creativity of an exceptional group of entrepreneurs, executives, and innovators. Participants included leaders at the leading edge of technology and media innovation from academia, venture capital, internet design, public media, social media, and research. Notable participants contributing to the day-long brainstorm included: Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist; Reid Hoffman, Chairman and co-Founder of LinkedIn; Roger McNamee, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elevation Partners; Chris Beard, Chief Innovation Officer of Mozilla; Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist and creator of Google News; and Sue Gardner, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation, among many others.

Here's how NPR's Kinsey Wilson framed their mission:

"Historic changes in technology and the rapid growth in digital media have had a profoundly disruptive effect on journalism, calling into question the news media's ability to fulfill its time-honored function as civic watchdog. Hardly a week goes by that we don’t hear of yet another major news organization cutting staff, curtailing coverage or closing its doors. As traditional news organizations struggle to adapt, new, non-traditional outlets are beginning to take their place. As a not-for-profit with a distinct business model, National Public Radio has benefited from the disruption and seen its audience grow. Americans now spend more time with NPR than any other news source. But it's hardly immune from the technological challenges of the era. And it's clear that the rise of digital media will ultimately disrupt NPR's business model as well. NPR has responded by recruiting digital leaders to serve the top of the organization, embarking on an unprecedented staff training program and overhauling its digital media strategy. It is poised to take further steps to ensure it remains a vital source of news on every platform."

The Digital Think In explored five main topics that are significant to NPR's ecosystem and its future: social media and connection to the audience, the organization's national network of more than 800 stations, the potential of its open API, expansion of platforms, and its diversified revenue model. After an NPR overview and an opening session, participants broke out into small groups to develop concepts that NPR can incorporate into its organizational road map.

Closing out the day, NPR's Vivian Schiller suggested to call the next gathering "Open-mic Night," given the stand-up performances of the presenters. She said she was overwhelmed by the ideas that came out of the event and that some of them could be implemented soon. Kinsey Wilson assured everyone that their efforts will not end up tossed in a dusty drawer and forgotten. So be it!

The event was live-blogged on the Think In micro-site which also featured live video streams of the opening and closing sessions. In addition, attendees were tweeting the event throughout the day using the hashtag #nprthinkin (and there was a lively conversation going on between on-site and remote participants; also check out the NPR Facebook page for comments).

You can view pictures of the event on Flickr.