Futures-Diagnosis

Diagnosing the future of the Internet and innovation and their social impact

September 30, 2009 • 12:42 pm 2

WATER ON THE MOON – A TONIC FOR INDIAN ASPIRATIONS AND THE FUTURE OF INNOVATION

Luna3 The discovery of significant quantities of water on the surface of the Moon by India’s first unmanned lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 is certainly something to celebrate. This is remarkable for two reasons: first because it has rekindled the dream of establishing a manned Moon base and further exploration deeper into space, particularly to Mars, and second, because it was the result not of a NASA lunar mission, but an Indian one.

Scientists have been baffled for four decades by the fact that rock samples brought back from the moon by the Apollo lunar missions showed evidence of the existence of water on the Moon. They were not sure if this was because there was water on the Moon or that this was the result of contamination from the Earth’s atmosphere. Now there is no question: water ice exists on the Moon – the ‘holy grail for lunar scientists for a very long time’, as  Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington put it. In a statement put out by NASA, he went on to explain how this extraordinary discovery came about:

“This surprising finding has come about through the ingenuity, perseverance and international cooperation between NASA and the India Space Research Organization.”

This cooperation was significant: NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3, instrument reported the observations. It was carried into space on Oct. 22, 2008, aboard the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. Data from the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer, or VIMS, on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, and the High-Resolution Infrared Imaging Spectrometer on NASA’s Epoxi spacecraft contributed to confirmation of the finding. The spacecraft imaging spectrometers made it possible to map lunar water more effectively than ever before.

So while NASA still played a significant role in this discovery, the fact that it was an Indian spacecraft is equally significant. India’s lunar programme is a result of the space race emerging between it and China. But whatever the domestic motivations underlying this competition, it highlights how significantly the space exploration field has shifted from West to East. While President Obama contemplates cutting back spending on the US space effort, India and China are surging ahead. We are thus in an era of transition: while a lot of the specialised technological innovation remains the preserve of NASA (given its past investment, innovation and experience), the drive towards pushing the boundaries of exploration are now increasingly coming from the East.

LOOK EAST

This reflects the global shift in economic power from West to East which the current recession has so sharply brought into focus. But more pertinent for the future of innovation, it reveals that this is now accompanied by a significant shift in Eastern aspirations, vision, and a willingness to take risks and push the boundaries of the known further. It suggests that in the same way that the US Space Programme had the unexpected outcome of solving thousands of problems for humanity in the 20th century (see NASA’s spin-off site here), the future of unexpected innovations and problem solving will increasingly come from the East this Century. But far from this representing a problem or being seen as a threat, this should be welcomed, and regarded, as Rob Killick succinctly argues, as an inspiration to us all.

Filed under: Risk and Innovation, Science and Innovation , , ,

September 24, 2009 • 5:56 pm 0

SERVING THE DIGITAL GENERATION

Serving the Digital Generation: Innovation for a New Breed of Customers is a new 120 page Telco2.0 Strategy Report, which I co-authored and which explores how the behaviours of the ‘Digital Generation’ – young people who have grown up with new media applications and technologies – will ultimately drive the future shape of the Telco business.

The key point of the report is that young people’s behaviour is no longer technology-driven, but reflects how this technology has been internalised and  now drives a new participatory culture which impacts across all generations and demographics online. The report’s focus is to explain these behaviours and how Telcos can innovate to meet these new challenges. Far from these behaviours representing a threat to existing business models and practices, Telcos need to understand them, embrace the underlining motivations and use them to reinvent services and business models that place this participation imperative at the core of their operations. Telcos need to enable participation, not get in its way. This is a huge opportunity.

Anyone interested in the future of Telcos and communication services ought to read Serving the Digital Generation. You should also attend next month’s Ecomm in Amsterdam where a number of these issues and related innovations will be debated and explored in some depth.

Filed under: Digital Kids, Innovation , ,

September 20, 2009 • 6:44 pm 0

PATENT PRAGMATISM: A THREAT TO R&D AND INNOVATION

The Economist of 12th September carried an important article on the new trend of patents as financial assets. Reporting this at a time when the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)  has just published its new report World Intellectual Property Indicators 2009 which shows that the number of patents being registered is now falling for the first time in years, this trend represents a sea-change in how patents have come to be regarded. The financialisation of intellectual property (IP) is actually the evolution of a longer-term trend of business short-termism and patent pragmatism divorced from innovation.

The Economist notes that the view of patents has been changing for some time: ‘What was once viewed as a stodgy legal asset is fast becoming a sought-after financial one’. But this is not particularly surprising. The emergence of patents as financial assets is an expression of how today’s risk-averse business culture with its focus upon short-term and predictable market returns, has reduced innovation to extremely narrow and instrumental terms. Once regarded as an indicator of innovation, patents have increasingly become an end in themselves – a means to recoup costs of R&D and to minimise the risks of investment in R&D.

The financialisation of patents is just the latest expression of the trend towards short-term financialisation rather than longer-term investment in R&D and innovation.

EXPRESSION OF A LONGER-TERM TREND

The Economist notes that this trend is still at an early stage but is growing relatively quickly – by perhaps 20-30 per cent a year. They cite this figure from Coller Capital, an investment firm that has snapped up IBM’s portfolio of medical-device and health-care patents. Intellectual Ventures, based near Seattle, has spent a large proportion of its $5 billion fund on buying patents: 27,000 to be precise. Other players exist and the field is growing.

On one level, the selling of IP is understandable and inevitable. For individual inventors and universities, many of whom lack the resources to chase infringers or to develop their IP effectively, the recession is forcing them to sell in order to survive. But at another level, particularly for many large technology providers, this behaviour represents a new phase of short-term pragmatism. As Peter Holden of Coller’s remarks, ‘Well-timed patent sales are also a way for public technology firms to meet quarterly profit targets’. Managing their IP more pragmatically means selling off patents that are peripheral to their core businesses. Patents effectively become an end in themselves, divorced from any innovation that the company may have pursued in the future.

PATENTS DIVORCED FROM INNOVATION

The current recession has certainly speeded up the longer-term squeeze on R&D budgets. As the demand for a rate of return on investment in R&D has grown, businesses have become increasingly risk-averse and wary of experimentation or unproven new ideas. Instead they have placed an emphasis upon profiting from the ones they already own. The result has been, as I have argued elsewhere on this blog, the reduction of innovation to extremely narrow and instrumental terms. Increasingly, patent production has become more closely related to the development of patent portfolios as a source of revenue in itself.

Ironically, one of the best expressions of this dynamic is the proliferation of patents themselves.

Although WIPO now suggest we are seeing a decline in globally of registered patent fillings for the first time, this is the opposite trend of the early part of this decade. According to the OECD, the early part of this decade saw an explosion of patent registrations: more than 442,000 patents applications were filed in Europe and the US in 2002, compared to around 224,000 a decade earlier. In their revealing study of the patent system in the US, Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System is Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What to Do About It authors Adam B Jaffe and Josh Lerner made the key point back in 2004, that this increase in patenting does not reflect an explosion of inventiveness or innovation. They argued that this increase was accompanied by a proliferation of patent awards of dubious merit. This was supported by another 2004 study by James Bessen, a researcher at Boston University’s School of Law, and Robert Hunt, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, that showed that by the end of the 1990s, firms were able to obtain more than twice as many software patents for every R&D dollar spent than at the start of the decade. They concluded that the growth in the number of patents was now exceeding the increase in R&D expenditure which indicated that ‘cheap’ patents were being used as a substitute for more R&D. The Economist concluded in their  survey on patents and technology in 2005 that industry  was doing too much patenting merely for the sake of it.

The proliferation of ‘cheap’ patents in the earlier part of this decade  was really an expression of how patents had rapidly become an end in themselves and, ironically, had become a substitute for more R&D spending. Developing a patent portfolio to exploit financially, became a key means of both minimising the risks of R&D investment and competition. For example, in this period, a company like IBM earned over $1 billion annually from its patent portfolio while a company like HP saw its revenue from licensing quadruple in less than three years to over $200m in 2005. Microsoft, a company that held a mere five patents in 1990 (when it was at its monopolistic height) rapidly began to file thousands of patents. Like many other large companies, Microsoft created a new Corporate Division to exchange its technology for cash or equity in start-up firms and to pursue patent infringements. The result? A massive rise of patent-related litigation.

LITIGATION AND FINANCIALISATION

The increase in patent-related litigation has increasingly made lawyers the key players in the competitive struggle between firms rather than entrepreneurs and researchers. (Even Dilbert has observed this trend). Litigation licensing units in large firms have successfully extracted license agreements and/or past royalties from smaller rivals. Texas Instrument, for example, has in recent years netted close to $1 billion annually from patent licenses and settlements resulting from an aggressive enforcement policy. In some years, revenues from these sources have exceeded net income from product sales!

It is not only large companies with patent portfolios that have increased their litigation practices. A new practice of ‘patent trolling’ has emerged – a practice where large companies are sued for dubious patent infringements by non practicing entities. Google published a statement on their Public Policy Blog, for example, stating that 90% of companies suing them for patent infringement were non practicing entities, and that in lots of cases, the patents had been “invented” by the patent lawyers themselves. See stopsoftwarepatents.org.

Patent trolling is to be expected and will grow as IP is increasingly financialised. Opportunism in business is nothing new. But the pursuit of patents as financial assets reveals how far (and fast) the trend towards short-term instrumentalism in innovation has gone. By concentrating on existing portfolios, patents as financial assets are a substitute for more R&D spending.

SHORT-TERMISM

This is not an abstract point to make about what might happen in the future. Its impact is already here and can be seen in the practices of companies like Novartis who now invest huge amounts of time and money in pursuing legal loopholes to extend the lifespan of their patents, rather than develop new ones. While this may squeeze the last drop of profit out of existing blockbuster drugs, it comes at the expense of their own development of new and genuinely innovative medicines.

This may very well ensure more profits in the immediate future through exploiting the patent system in this way rather than investing in long-term R&D, but the approach smacks of staggering short-termism. Last year, only two research-based pharmaceutical companies generated more than 10 per cent of their revenue from “major” products less than three years old, and there are no signs of an upturn.

The greatest danger of patents as financial assets, however, is the threat of the institutionalised separation of R&D from innovation itself. The emphasis is upon the knowable and the exploitation of what exists, to gain the short-term return. But longer-term experimentation, discovery and unexpected outcomes are now in danger of being expunged from corporate culture and practice altogether. This is not a trend to celebrate but to resist.

Filed under: Economics of Innovation, R&D and Innovation , , ,

September 16, 2009 • 11:47 pm 2

The myth of digital whizkids

Yesterday  The Times2 supplement ran a feature written by Kate Muir titled ‘The Digital Divide: the perils of failing to keep pace with your child’. The article focused on a new campaign called the ‘21st Century School Project’ – a campaign to help parents, teachers and pupils ‘tackle the dark side of the internet’, to teach children how to use ‘offline wisdom, online’, launched by Professor Tanya Byron (the author of the government-backed 2008 Byron Review Safer Children in a Digital World, which resulted in the creation of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety).

At one level the idea of protecting young children in the online space seems obvious. But the problem with the campaign is the assumptions it is based upon. Kate Muir puts this succinctly when she states that the problem is ‘millions of tech-savvy kids, brilliantly equipped for the future, but lost in the maze of the Internet without a moral map’. The absence of a moral map stems from the observation, Byron adds, which is that ‘in the online world, parents are the immigrants and children are the natives’. According to Byron this mismatch in roles means parents are not able to fulfill their role as parents: ‘…your parents taught you how to cross the road and not to talk to strangers when you first went out in (sic) your own, didn’t they?’ she is quoted as telling an assembly of school kids. In other words, this generation of technology whiz kids are not being taught how to traverse the Internet highway by their technologically challenged parents. Hence the need for another internet-safety moral campaign run by ‘experts’ on behalf of Britain’s inadequate parents. Clear? Yes, but fundamentally flawed.

The contempt for adults is breathtaking but not surprising, for the campaign is based upon the rarely explored myth that young people are naturally good with technology, while adults are ‘past it’ and incapable of keeping pace with their children.

This assumption needs to be challenged for a number of reasons:

  • First, because it mistakenly assumes that young people effortlessly adopt digital technology into their lives because they are into the technology;
  • Secondly, because the myth of digitally savvy children is actually an expression of adult confusion about how to conduct their relations with children, which has little to do with children’s relationship to the new media;
  • Third, because it flatters children instead of critically engaging them in a quest to engage more fully with the technology itself; to understand the science and mathematics behind the magic of the digital world; and,
  • Fourth, because by reducing adults to the level of children in need of expert guidance, it undermines adult authority thus making it even more difficult for young people to take the question of their security and privacy online seriously.

Contemporary childhood and digital technology

If you want to understand how and why children adopt digital technologies into their lives, then understand how their experience of childhood has changed. In recent decades, childhood has been fundamentally reorganised around risk. Childhood has become perceived as an exceedingly dangerous experience – their health, outdoor activity, indoor activity, online activity, family life, peer relations, encounters with adults – are now represented as risky. Children are now frequently defined as ‘vulnerable’ or ‘at risk’.

The creation of the ‘indoor child’ whose leisure activities, increasingly dominated by new media, have been transferred to the ‘safety’ of the domestic sphere is one symptom of this risk consciousness. When children are allowed to venture outdoors, to play with friends or play sports, adults now supervise these activities.

This decline of ‘street culture’ and the rise of ‘bedroom culture’ have a number of fundamental consequences:

  • First, children’s lives have increasingly become dominated by the presence of adults;
  • Second, digital technology is used by children to overcome their experience of isolation;
  • Third, peer communications result in a distinct peer culture that is digitally mediated and which seeks to gain a measure of independence through evading adult monitoring.

Thus, the changing character of childhood – particularly the shift from outdoor to indoor – has created a steady demand for tools and applications that help children manage their lives. This is the impetus behind their adoption and rapid internalization of the technology. It is driven by their social needs, by their relationship to popular culture and their peers, not a love of technology. It also results in a number of important dynamics and conflicts with parents that shape this experience on both sides.

Inter-generational dynamic

While parents regard new technology as an educational tool, children regard it as a medium of entertainment and connectivity; parents approach to the new media is underwritten by the imperative of risk minimisation while children adopt and use it in part to gain a measure of freedom from adult supervision. Customisation, demarcation and self-expression are the requirements of a generation that regards self-expression as itself a form of communication. Above all else, they passionately seek to protect their interaction space from the monitoring of adults.

From this perspective, media technology is not something to be shared but is something to be customized, personalized and consumed privately out of the sight of adults. Indeed, this intergenerational dynamic is one of the key drivers of technology adoption by young people, which the ‘21st Century Project’ seems oblivious too.

Enter the ‘digital whiz kid’

Many adults find it difficult to comprehend children’s digital activities. As a result, adults often wrongly attribute this to the ‘natural’ ability to manipulate new technology. Adult insecurities regarding the emerging peer culture are refracted through anxieties about their own technological incompetence. The belief that children are naturally creative users of digital technology is a myth fueled by adult insecurities and expresses more about how adults have become confused about how to conduct their relations with children than anything to do with children and their relationship to the new media technologies.

For some time now, parents, teachers, and other adults involved with children have gone out of their way to cross the generational divide and become young people’s friends rather than their mentors. Uncertainties about adulthood are invariably linked to changing ideas about childhood. In a world where maturity is disparaged as being ‘past it’, and the older generation is seen as having no special claim to wisdom, parents can feel awkward about exercising authority. These cultural trends have a profound influence in the ways that parents make sense of their children’s relationship with the new media. When it comes to new media technology, an intense sense of parental incompetence co-exists with the belief that children are naturally highly skilled computer-savvy whiz kids.

However, there are a variety of good reasons why the erosion adult confidence has acquired a particularly intense manifestation in relation to the new media:

  • Unlike the younger generations that have grown up with these technologies, many adults have a limited and episodic relationship to them. Alan Kay’s rejoinder that anything invented after you are born is technology is apposite here;
  • Young people value and acquire computer expertise in order to achieve practical objectives. Children experience the media as an integral part of youth culture;
  • Adults tend to have a more distant and functional relationship to it;
  • Many aspects of the new media – gaming, texting, instant messaging, chatting, social networks etc. – are seen as part of young people’s world. This is an alien territory where adults find it even more difficult than in other areas of their lives to exercise their authority.

The presentation of children as media savvy and naturally gifted and ahead of their parents is merely another form that the idealisation of childhood assumes in Western society. Many studies indicate that children do not possess natural talents and abilities, which are somehow lost as they make the transition to adulthood. The tendency to celebrate the natural aptitude of children distracts from understanding why their technical ability can sometime exceed those of adults. It is not natural ability but social isolation and a lack of autonomous space that prompts participation in the wider youth consumer culture and encourages engagement and experimentation with different forms of new media. Since it is one of the key markers of status in peer-to-peer relations, children have a strong incentive to familiarise themselves with the new media.

It is the imperative of youth consumer culture rather than a natural disposition to interact with new technology that explains why children often appear to be so ahead of adults.

It is the assimilation of this culture by the younger generations that gives them the technological edge over their elders. In so far as children’s technical competence exceeds their elder’s it reflects their proximity to and involvement in contemporary youth consumer culture. Nothing more nor less.

More harm than good

Thus, the relationship between young people and technology is far more complex than the simple couplet of ‘Digital Natives’ and ‘Digital Immigrants’ suggests. There is nothing natural or preordained about this relationship. It is a complex relationship, which stems from contemporary society and the lived experience of young people. A campaign like the ‘21st Century Project’ will do more harm than good.

In the first place, young people will resist adult incursions into their digital spaces. Part of their acquisition of skills has been the incidental outcome of their attempt to get round all kinds of barriers adults place before them in the online space. This will not change and will remain the cat and mouse tension of the adult/child intergenerational dynamic.

More importantly, it will only have the effect of further undermining adult confidence and their ability to deal with young people and the digital media. A campaign like the ‘21st Century Project’ undermines adult authority and infantilises adults. This will have an even more detrimental long-term impact on young people than anything they might stumble upon online today.

Filed under: Authority, Digital Kids ,

September 14, 2009 • 12:30 pm 9

TEDxLeeds: innovating out of the recession

Last week I spoke at the TEDxLeeds event on the recession and innovation, organised by Imran Ali and Herb Kim.

It was a well attended event with a very well-informed and engaged audience and judging by the twitter chatter, (#TEDxLeeds) the event seemed to go down extremely well. (Congrats to Imran and Herb and all involved! See the Ian Forrester’s blog post on cubicgarden.com for another view of the event). What was refreshing was the enthusiasm in the audience for challenging the existing culture of limits and low expectations. The points about the need for more risk-taking and greater experimentation, and opposition to the contemporary business culture of short-term pragmatism versus longer-term investment in research, appeared to resonate with a large section of the audience.This highlights that this is the time to develop bold new arguments for why we need

  • more long-term investment in research (as opposed to the short-term funding of development);
  • more experimentation and less emphasis upon predictable outcomes driven by narrow ROI considerations; and
  • more failure to build success.

Watch this space!

Below are some of the slides I used during my presentation. The key points should be obvious. But in case the Kennedy and Moon slides confuse, my point was simply that the US Space Program (despite being rooted in the politics of the Cold War) provided a bold vision and impetus to the generation of ground-breaking new research and innovation. The research created new industries while NASA provided impetus for the formation of thousands of new companies and product innovation. It is this kind of boldness that is so noticeably absent in our society today.

(This presentation has been selected amongst the ‘Top Presentations of the Day’ on the SlideShare homepage).

Filed under: R&D and Innovation, Risk and Innovation , , ,

September 9, 2009 • 4:00 pm 5

REINVENTING THE CO-OPERATIVE FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY?

design_vlume.inddFor a number of years some colleagues and I have been toying with the idea of reinventing the 21st Century co-operative by leveraging the network effect of the Internet and social networks.

Our starting point was a very simple proposition: create a web-based platform to enable the creation of consumer cooperatives that would enable like-minded people to pool their collective value and use this power to negotiate and enter into financial exchanges or service contracts that represent longer-term value for money. The value for the consumer would be better market value and a more informed retail experience, leveraged through grouped buying power. Instead of disparate individuals, we would effectively become large corporations with the power to negotiate better deals. And unlike previous attempts to create buying clubs, we recognised that this would serve the interests of suppliers or retails. By providing an online interface between suppliers and a segmented group of ‘likeminded’ and ‘ready to purchase’ consumers, suppliers would acquire multiple customers in a single hit and at a fraction of the typical customer acquisition costs.

To begin to realise this idea we created an alpha website branded vlume.com (which stands for ‘Value Me’…please remember this was an alpha site!). This was founded on the belief that consumers acting collectively can develop the power to influence markets and thus gain real value for the money they spend. Individual consumers, on the other hand, have little power, only the ‘freedom’ to act within the constraints set by the market.

ME TO THE POWER OF US

The idea is very simple but enormously powerful: if you spend £35.00 a month on mobile telephony, this represents an annual payment of £420. Over five years you will be spending £2,100. Now just add 10 people in the same position to your total and collectively you represent £21,000; add 100 and you are now collectively worth £210,000, a thousand members and you’re worth £2,100.000 to a mobile company over five years. No operator anywhere in the world treats any of us like we’re potentially part of a netwrok that represents such long-term value to them. Why not use that leverage to negotiate a better plan or better  handsets or both?

By pooling our collective consumer power, our objective was to ensure people could take control of their value – from gaining value for financial exchanges or contracts they enter into for services – to the future syndication of their data and meta-data. In this respect, and in relation to working through the business benefits for the retailer or supplier, vlume.com was more than just another ‘buying club’.

Our motivation for doing this stemmed from two sources, one technological in origin and the other socio-political.

THE NETWORK EFFECT

The technological origin of vlume.com was provided by the observation of David Reed about how human communication added another dimension to computer networks such that the value of the network grew proportionally not to the square of the users, but exponentially. Reed’s key insight is that jointly constructed value is the net outcome of the laws that govern technical networking and social networking. The value and usages of services that scaled by newly emerging and then dominant-scaling laws grew faster than the previously dominant functions like its role as a terminal network in the early days of the ARPANET. This allowed the Internet to absorb many kinds of transactions and collaborations that had been conducted outside of it. The remarkable outcome: a technically derived network transformed into a social platform for the joint construction of value. The Internet thus becomes nothing more than a platform of, and for, human connection and experimentation. And this is historically unique because the Internet combines two extraordinary properties: it is both a vehicle for individual autonomy and expression and social interaction and cooperation.

This is the real potential of the Internet. Society now has the opportunity of a new lived experience where the potential for independence and for social cooperation exist within the same framework. In short, individual interests and discrete needs can be realised through collaboration potentially reinventing collective action and power. It is this potential that vlume.com sought to realise.

The second source for this idea was based upon our lived experience and social observation.

PRESENTISM AND CUSTOMER VALUE

We recognised that we were living in an increasingly risk-averse society where short-term expediency had gained ascendancy over the idea of the long-term future. Presentism now invades all aspects of contemporary culture. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in business where a preoccupation with predictability and short-term results has replaced old notions of long term planning, investment or research for innovation; jobs for life and, indeed, customers for life. This quick-return, low-risk culture has entrenched a culture of banal expediency. Increasingly customers are being flattered that they are the most important asset in business, but are, in reality, merely the vehicles of short-term commercial expediency. We all know that despite the fabulous package deals we are offered on mobile telephone contracts, we are still being ripped off by our operators.

We observed that this expediency has very negative consequences:

  • First, it presents lowered horizons and limited choice as the best and only choices available to the consumer. Limited choices force consumers to restrict their behaviours and aspirations. This appears to confirm the pragmatism of the enterprise and reinforces their self-flattery, which falsely suggests they are actually providing ‘what customers need’. The net result is a dumbed-down commercial culture that feeds on and nurtures an ever-decreasing pool of innovation – a scenario in which everyone loses;
  • Second, it institutionalises the bifurcation between value and price. Customer needs and experiences are increasingly measured in crude prices. The logic of such a spiral only increases the pressure to become even more pragmatic. As value increasingly equates with lowered prices, consumer choice is even more severely strained while the enterprise can see no alternative but to continue in the same way;
  • Third and perhaps most importantly, the potential of new innovation is squandered at a time when new digital technologies are opening up enormous opportunities for the future. New areas of value – particularly the richness of personal data and meta-data – which have the potential to transform the world as we know it, will not be able to be realised. Instead, such potential will only feed the existing culture of short-termism and expediency.

Vlume.com was an attempt to challenge the contemporary passive consumption by mobilising the power of people through web-based platforms for collective action. Although we had to drop vlume.com temporarily – yes, we all had to succumb to the same short-termism and expediency of getting jobs – the power of the idea remains compelling. Yochai Benkler in his very interesting book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom gives an insight of what this potential represents with respect to the existing media:

‘A billion people in advanced economies may have between them between two billion and six billions spare hours among them, every day. In order to harness these billions of hours, it would take the whole workforce of almost 340,000 workers employed by the entire motion picture and recording industries in the United States put together, assuming each worker worked forty-hour weeks without taking a single vacation, for between three and eight and a half years! Beyond the sheer potential quantitative capacity, however one wishes to discount it to account for different levels of talent, knowledge, and motivation, a billion volunteers have qualities that make them more likely to produce what others want to read, see, listen to, or experience’.

When you begin to think of the power we could muster, as Benkler notes above, it is frustrating to see how trivial social networks like MySpace or Facebook, remain today. If anyone thinks vlume.com is a compelling proposition, please get in touch. There is a lot more developed thinking and structure behind this, which I would be happy to share.

Perhaps we could put the power of networks to work in realising this as a collective endeavour? Any takers?

Filed under: Innovation ,

September 7, 2009 • 11:26 am 8

When entrepreneurship and innovation part company

Continuing on the theme of social media, this article, ‘Why ALL bosses should copy me and ban Facebook from the workplace’ which appeared in the Mail Online last Wednesday, neatly sums up why innovation is actually a dying craft in British industry.

Written by one of Britain’s prominent entrepreneurs, Dragon’s Den judge Theo Paphitis, the article rails against Facebook as a time waster in the workplace. He argues that while ‘the internet has created dramatic new opportunities in everything from marketing to distribution’, it has a downside: namely, an explosion in online activity which has resulted in ‘an orgy of self-indulgence and exhibitionism’ which ‘has polluted the air with meaningless babble and egomaniacal drivel’. This impulse, exercised through social media like Facebook, or Twitter, wastes work time and should be, in the opinion of this entrepreneurial dragon, ‘best kept to free time at home’. ‘In the end’, he says ‘businesses and public services cannot survive if staff prefer to be socialising online rather than doing the job for which they are paid’.

Filed under: Innovation , ,

September 4, 2009 • 7:14 pm 5

The Social Media ‘Revolution’ debate – time for some social and historical context

In a very well argued piece There’s no social media revolution, Paul Seaman takes a welcome critical view of the hype surrounding social media in the enterprise. While there is much to agree with him on, especially his critique of the technological-determinism underpinning the debate (the technology will sweep all before it regardless of context), his argument remains one-sided and over-determined by the terms the supporters of the social media revolution have set for the debate. As a result I think he fails to appreciate just what is new in today’s social and business environment.

TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

First, social context always determines how technologies are adopted and used and therefore what impact they may have. The history of technological innovation is the history of unforeseen transformations. Technologies clearly invented or conceived for one clearly defined use have acquired other unexpected uses over time and have become part of the social evolution and progress of human society. When humans have created tools they have excelled at finding new usages for them. As David Nye puts it in his excellent Technology Matters:  ‘latent in every tool are unforeseen transformations’. In short, social mediation transforms technologies into what are acceptable and socially useful adjuncts. It is social circumstances, not the functionalities within technologies that determine precisely how a technology will be adopted, used or rejected.

Thus, it is too one-sided to simply assert that technologies do not change the business environment, that business is business regardless of historical context. At one level, there is truth in this: market-driven economics dictate that unless you make a profit you will go out of business. Any technology successfully introduced into the enterprise, be it the spinning jenny or computers, will be determined by their impact  on the overall profitability of the company. And yes, the hype of social media will soon come up against the structural impediment of the division of labour and corporate culture. How this might impact these and where it goes is anyone’s guess at this point in time. But what we can be sure of is that corporate culture will inevitably change as a result of the introduction of social media into the enterprise. Will this be a revolution? We will see. Unforeseen consequences are precisely that: unforeseen.

But it raises a more fundamental and prior question which is why are enterprises adopting social media into their day-to-day operations?

A NEW SOCIAL CONTEXT

This brings me to my second concern: being drawn into the debate on the terms set by the social media hype merchants fails to appreciate how fundamentally the social context has shifted. There are three notable points to make which combine to make this period quite unique:

  • First, the introduction of social media into the enterprise goes against the historical evolution of how key technologies have disseminated across society. For the first time, the enterprise is being infused by consumer-based technologies and behaviours; not the other way around. The telephone, fax, email, mobile telephony etc all began as enterprise tools and gradually seeped from the enterprise into society. Now its the other way around;
  • Second, younger generations growing up with these technologies have integrated them into their lives like no other generation and as a result have impacted broader social trends disproportionately. Again this is historically specific: it is not the technology that has attracted young people but their social needs. This is the result of how risk culture has transformed childhood. Children have increasingly been attracted to digital media as a way to escape the constant gaze of adults, create spaces for their self-expression, identity play, entertainment and social experimentation. This has been a systematically misunderstood phenomenon: ‘digital kids’ have become digital whiz-kids who are regarded as naturally brilliant with technology – in contrast to the dinosaur generation; namely, adults. (The notion of ‘digital whiz-kids is a myth which I cannot deal with here but will in future posts). Most worrying is the fact that adult society is mimicking the digital generation. Just observe the demographics of the Facebook generation to see how the behaviours of this generation now influence older generations and not the other way around;
  • Third, the elevation of digital children has resulted in a loss of confidence amongst adults, especially with respect to the digital media. But this crisis of confidence is far deeper and has become a crisis of adult authority and legitimacy. This crisis can be seen in government and the enterprise: whether its to do with the state outsourcing its authority (the relinquishing of control of the Bank of England is perhaps one of the starkest examples to-date) or within the enterprise, through the increased use of external consultants or the outsourcing of innovation, etc the loss of confidence across society has become palpable.

These points need to be explored further which I hope to do on this blog in the future. They represent some key social changes underpinning the social context within which social media are being increasingly adopted within and without the enterprise. There has been a silent social transformation which the ’social media revolution’ is an expression of, rather than a cause. In short, my argument is that the adoption of social media has more to do with the crisis of authority and legitimacy within the business world and more broadly across society, than anything inherently revolutionary in the technology itself.

The debate about the social media, by concentrating on an exaggerated technologically-determined sense of change, misses these critical points. Yes, the introduction of these technologies is going to have an effect (and has some enormous potential). But the outcomes will not be determined by the technologies per se, but by the underlying social context. This remains paramount and understanding this will allow us to gain an historical perspective so lacking in the contemporary debate.

Filed under: Authority, Digital Kids , ,

September 2, 2009 • 6:03 pm 5

The proliferation of innovative book titles…and little else

The more I investigate the state of innovation today, the more convinced I am that we are living in an era of innovation hype with little real innovation taking place. The term now appears everywhere: in newspapers, books, journals, government policies, education, the health service you name it. The term proliferates everywhere.

I have been tracking this since 2005 and will share some of my research: On Lexis-Nexis I did a simple article search of the world’s leading newspapers using the term ‘technological innovation’ over the past 3 decades:

  • Between 1970 and 1980, there were exactly 55 articles that mentioned the term
  • Between 1980 and 1990 this grew to 993
  • Between 1990 and 2000 this grew to 3,575
  • And from 2000 to 2007 the figure stood 4,583!

If you turn to the Internet and do a search on Amazon.com you will see there are now 326,266 books available with the term ‘innovation’ somewhere in their titles. On amazon.co.uk, the number is 105,503. (Does this mean the US is three times as innovative?). When I did this search in 2007, the result on Amazon.co.uk was 5,513!

How to interpret this massive hike in books?

Never mind the numbers, just examine some of the titles and the answer begins to emerge: interspersed among the usual suspects (Henry W Chesbrough, Clayton M. Christensen, Rosabeth Moss Kanter , Scott Berkun, Kelley & Litt. and Harvard Business Review to name a few prominent authors and publications who have made a significant contribution to the debate) are books that include ‘Sock Innovation’, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church’, ‘Outdoor Play in the Early Years: Management and Innovation’, ‘Innovation: Applying Knowledge in Development’ and so on…

No doubt, some of these books have some interesting insights on the subjects they focus upon. But the proliferation of ‘innovation’ books does suggest that the term has now become a trivialised and vacuous concept, increasingly reflecting a debate that is taking place within its own terms and no longer linked to a broader purpose.

My fear is that ‘innovation’ as a concept has become a cultural affectation and in business, an advertising gimmick; the something everyone must now pay lip service to. My concern is that this extraordinary attempt to promote or talk up innovation is actually a sign of its absence. If we were living through an era of real innovation surely we would be having a different discussion? Surely we would be talking about the outcomes or its impact or what is next.

Filed under: Innovation ,

• 2:54 pm 0

Trust online: Who Authorises Authority?

In the 21st century human reality is intensely mediated through the knowledge, information and resources made available through offline and online technology. The media is not simply an institution that provides information and entertainment; it provides people with access to resources and important social networks. Through the growth of the global media and the diversification of its activities our reality is dominated by a world constructed through and by the media. However our capacity to realise the potential benefits of the new media is limited by absence of authoritative online institutions.

In contemporary times authority is continually tested, negotiated and contested. Gone are the days when individuals or groups could enjoy unquestioned authority. We may live in a knowledge economy that values the status of experts but the public continually demands that scientists, policy makers and the media account for their statements. Through experience and competitive claims making, society takes the authority of some sources of information more seriously than others. People are more likely to trust what they hear on the BBC or what they read in The New York Times than what they encounter through less reputable sources. However on the internet the situation is more fluid and confusing. The new media is evolving at a rapid pace and is still in the process of constructing new forms of authority.

One of the big questions confronting the on-line world is who authorises authority? How can people decide which sources of information to trust? How is authority earned, maintained and developed?

One of the principal focus of my research is the constitution of authority and the building of trust online. One of my aims is to provide advice to facilitate strategic decision makers about what kind of trust-building measures are most suitable for consolidating the authority of their projects.

Filed under: Authority, Trust , ,

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