online TV and radio: two revolutionary ways of staying tuned
Here are two interesting innovations I’d recommend. It’s not every day you buy a product and once you’ve unwrapped it you think that it’s made your day. It’s not every day you buy a product and switch it on and find out that it works well and that you are ready to use it and feel quite exhilarated. It’s not every day you fulfil a requirement at €129 (£99 UK price). And this is exactly what happened last Saturday when I went to buy Orange’s Liveradio, an Internet radio that works — and works well — is user-friendly and doesn’t force you to switch on your computer. Who would want to do that when one has just woken up, is hardly awake, and poring one’s cornflakes in a bowl. I am not even mentioning fighting one’s computer addiction which is one of the major drawbacks of having to work in computers all day long. Liveradio is selling like hot cakes in France and has also been introduced in England. At the end of the day what is willing revolutionary about it is not its website which you may want to use to configure your radio, although it works reasonably well. What is revolutionary is that this appliance is well and truly a computer but you can’t see it and don’t have bear its flaws. In essence it is sort of innovation in reverse. Instead of having a radio plugged or emulated by a computer, it’s a computer that is integrated and hidden within the body of a radio, that is to say a computer with fewer functionality but just the basic functionality that a radio needs. Its menus are versatile and customisable and you can browse the radios much more easily by using the simple straightforward jog dial than using a mouse on a computer.
At the end of the day, Liveradio is the only way to listen to France Inter in England or the BBC in France, or any other combination of countries/radios. It’s a very comfortable and no hassle way of using Internet radios. Similar products exist or will be produced and made available soon, but they are not so many and not so easily available. One could also recommend Liveradio to that group of strangely eccentric fanatics of FIP radio, a 70′s style music-only Paris-based channel belonging to Radio France. This group of fans is based in Brighton and they are constantly fighting to gain access to it from across the Channel.
We are just a few months/years away from mobile entertainment anywhere, any time for the masses and it’s not difficult to imagine what kind of sociological changes will be triggered by such technologies which will enable you to connect at any time in any place.
Very often, I hear people say that you have to make your end-user’s lives easier to generate a marketing success. However paved with good intentions this statement may be, I did ask myself the question whether making users’ live easier is a sustainable marketing argument for the development of a business. Here are my thoughts on this subject:
First and foremost, I wondered whether revenue could be linked to user-friendliness and ease of use of the service? Very often, it is said that what made Apple’s success was the user-friendliness of its products. This explanation, however, is very debatable. What could be simple for a certain user, mainly because he is used to a certain feature or a certain way of doing things, may seem complex to another. And this is even true of such well-designed products as the Mac Intosh, or the iPOD. For instance, it happened to me many times that I advised new Apple buyers who were complaining about the lack of the contextual click on their new Mac mouse. I had to show them that they had to press the button for approximately one second in order to display that contextual menu. This simple gesture may seem very user-friendly to most Mac users, whereas having a two button mouse may seem very unusual and quirky to them. But to most Windows users (just a little reminder, this is 97% of the population) this way of working with a mouse is very quirky too. Can we easily conclude that these design particularities (which could be considered as great by some and quirky by others) are a good selling argument, which are sufficient to explain how successful the product was? I’m not really sure, due to the fact that there are a number of users who discover these design features after buying the products and not before.
Secondly, I’m wondering whether user-friendliness is a constant with time? As a matter of fact, I think that user-friendliness can be pictured on a curve (similar to the hype cycle curve by partner), which explains the evolution of a user and the user-friendliness factor in the course of the usage of the machine or software. By the time a user gets used to the features of the new software or the new hardware, including those which are very exotic, the end-user will become more and more exacting. A feature which might be unusual, or even useless when you start using a product for instance, may eventually prove very useful and even compulsory with time. For instance, when I started using my newly purchased HTC 7500 advantage, the 3-D communication capability seemed to me superfluous; but I started using it more and more, and then I started to dive into the complexity of the menus and options. Now, the 3-G capability of my PDA has really become irreplaceable. If I were to lose it, I would struggle goes straight away to shop and buy a flat fee subscription for 3G, because I really need this feature now. As a conclusion, what seemed complex and useless at the outset (menu configurations to connect, proxy parameters, etc) very shortly became an absolute necessity for me to connect my machine to the Internet and use it to the full.
Thirdly, it may happen that a feature, which seemed user-friendly, and convenient in the beginning, becomes useless and irritating with time. For instance, we could describe the T9 (so-called ‘predictive text’) feature on mobile phones as very useful when we discover it for the first time. When you don’t have a keyboard on your mobile phone or your smartphone and you want to type a text (short message, note, calendar entrey, etc) this feature may seem really great and useful. You start typing the beginning of the words, and then the system will fetch into the dictionary and will complete the entry. However, with time, this feature appears quirky, and even generates unwanted effects. As a result, the feature which was meant to simplify usage becomes cumbersome, superfluous, and it even gets on your nerves to a point where you actually de-activate it (as long as you are able to work your way through the menus to re-instate manual entry). Eventually, users and mostly youngsters prefer to use abbreviations, and even this weird phonetic SMS lingo to communicate. This is a good example of a feature which seemed useful in the beginning, and was meant to make users’ lives easier, but which at the end of the day is so complex that the users want to get rid of it.
Other pertinent examples can certainly come to your mind, but as a conclusion of these brief article, I can add that user-friendliness is probably what is the most difficult thing to achieve in this world, because it is both subjective and personal (what seems easy for one may seem difficult to others) and because it evolves with time, with the usage of the system in one way or another. At the end of the day design can be a hell paved with good intentions, where user-friendliness and simplicity is aimed at but where one generates a lot of irritation and frustration. Most importantly, because this criterion is very subjective, it would probably generate a halo effect if we were to try and measure its impact on sales and revenues, or even worse if we were to predict future revenues based on user-friendliness. Conversely, we can certainly find a very good number of products or services, which went through huge commercial success despite the fact their usability was really bad or even downright awful (one will remember. Siemens’ Gigaset telephones, which were tremendously successful from a commercial point of view a few years ago whereas their menus were absolutely useless; for instance turning on your speaker phone required that you pressed the ‘INT’ key and then press eight for what it means!?). I hope that this article however is not going to entice manufacturers to make lives even more difficult for users, because I think this is hard enough as it is.
However, and however much we regret it, we think it would be wrong to believe that user-friendliness and the quality of a user manuals is a recipe for success.
As I explained in a previous post on his blog, my gifts for the New Year is now available for download at www.visionarymarketing.com. Here is the introductory text again for those who have missed the previous entry.
“If you have always wanted to know everything about innovation but were too afraid to ask, rest assured because Visionary Marketing will bring this information to you in a few days.
Our good friend Brice Auckenthaler (founder and general manager of Experts-Consulting, a leading edge Innovation Consultancy group based in Paris, France) has been kind enough to let us publish the first few sheets from his brand new book to come: Imagination 3.0. Although the official release of Imagination 3.0 will take place in late January, you will be able to read and download the first few pages of this new unmissable opus in a few days from now.
Brice is undoubtedly our best expert in innovation and his and his team’s ability cover the entire spectrum of innovation, from creativity to making the rubber meet the road. Their references encompass major players as Nestlé and Thalys, Maserati, Mc Donald’s, Ferrari, Kraft, Coca Cola, Société Générale and others. Their footprint is International (Europe, USA, Asia, South America, China, Australia etc.) and their teams multi-cultural. Their capabilities extend from benchmarking, interviews and research, scenario planning [brand architecture and brand stretching], to brand & innovation committees on the new brand assets, new initiatives for product launches.”
If you have always wanted to know everything about innovation but were too afraid to ask, rest assured because Visionary Marketing will bring this information to you in a few days.
Our good friend Brice Auckenthaler (founder and general manager of Experts-Consulting, a leading edge Innovation Consultancy group based in Paris, France) has been kind enough to let us publish the first few sheets from his brand new book to come: Imagination 3.0. Although the official release of Imagination 3.0 will take place in late January, you will be able to read and download the first few pages of this new unmissable opus in a few days from now.
Brice is undoubtedly our best expert in innovation and his and his team’s ability cover the entire spectrum of innovation, from creativity to making the rubber meet the road. Their references encompass major players as Nestlé and Thalys, Maserati, Mc Donald’s, Ferrari, Kraft, Coca Cola, Société Générale and others. Their footprint is International (Europe, USA, Asia, South America, China, Australia etc.) and their teams multi-cultural. Their capabilities extend from benchmarking, interviews and research, scenario planning [brand architecture and brand stretching], to brand & innovation committees on the new brand assets, new initiatives for product launches.
Stay tuned to visionary marketing and don’t miss it!
Granted, the character on the left-hand side may not be representative of the average European teen age group, but I needed to attract your attention. Still, unconventional behaviour is what awaits the average corporation wanting to launch a 2.0 website. When I write unconventional, maybe I should correct this and replace it with behaviour adapted to different conventions. Jennifer Jactel of the Toulouse graduate school of management is digging her teeth into this issue with a very good report on generational marketing aimed at teenagers.
“Creating a blog has become really easy and its use has been standardized, even in the business world. But managing a corporate blog is still challenging because one has to deal with comments and posts which might get out of hand very quickly; keeping tabs on one’s brand image and reacting quickly to issues is also a serious problem. Of course it is time consuming, but it is also worthwhile.
Indeed, more than saving on communication costs, it enables businesses to get direct feedbacks from consumers and interact with them too, to control the information they want to release, but above all to improve their image through an appropriate Web presence. Because teenagers are Internet freaks, B2C marketing strategies will have more impact if the organization is present online, particularly through a blog. However, teenagers are also advertising-averse, therefore enticing enterprises to be more and more creative and innovative in their marketing campaigns or products; all this means that they also have to gain their trust, mainly through the establishment of direct contact.
Businesses targeting teenagers should really think about incorporating direct web communication within their marketing strategies. However challenging this may be, it can lead to real success in the blogosphere and beyond. Indeed, a teenager who likes something will tell his friends and so on and so forth, thereby starting a word of mouth promotion of your approach”
A short while ago I went to visit one of my customers in order to have a discussion about innovation. One of the ideas that was mentioned during this meeting was about the need to have a repository in which ideas could be stored and in which one could also exchange and debate about them. Immediately, the idea of a wiki sprang to my mind. It’s only natural because this is what I’m using in the office; at Orange business services we have a Confluence(*) wiki platform, set up on top of an Oracle files database (a popular CMS platform used for building repositories) and the wiki enables us to store as many documents as we wish and start discussions with our colleagues and actually to organise ourselves around projects. This is very convenient and I thought it was worth mentioning in a discussion with my client.
And indeed the client in question was interested. However, this client also mentioned to me the name of a project by IBM that I have never heard of before: Thinkplace. At first I thought it was some sort of piece of software that you would put on the Intranet and then use to share material with your colleagues. But then I realised, by searching the Web with the ‘thinkplace’ keyword, that thinkplace was actually a fully fledged open Internet website whereby anybody, repeat anybody, can post ideas in order to be debated with others. I don’t know if that’s web 2.0 for you, but I think that’s a great idea. So I entered my idea. The only way to test the system, is to do it hands-on, and actually if it is about proposing new ideas and getting people to start discussions, I thought it would be a great opportunity to submit an idea I had thought of and get the opinion of others. So here’s my idea, in writing and in a short video which I recorded for the purpose and posted on Facebook too.
The idea is to enable collective and fully connected shared open spaces, between different companies, on the outskirts of the cities of our big metropolises to avoid unnecessary commuting, + provide outstanding infrastructure & tools for knowledge workers
Reduce the impact of commuting on the environment, improve work efficiency, develop open innovation, improve well-being of employees
How would it work? How might it be implemented?
Several high-tech companies could partner together to provide such shared spaces, in partnership with professional real-estate companies. Shared spaces could then be rented out to companies (large or medium) who would rent a number of cubicles for their employees: salespeople, knowledge workers, clerks etc
What are the benefits to the stakeholders of this idea?
The idea is to enable collective and fully connected shared open spaces, between different companies. On the outskirts of the cities of our big metropolises so as to avoid unnecessary commuting, as well as provide a work dedicated area for knowledge workers, and also entice knowledge sharing across different organisations. The project is not technologycal per se, but technology is of the essence when it comes to making people collaborate. These shared office spaces could also be the opportunity for high technology companies (IT infrastructure, application software, telecommunications etc) to demonstrate new technologies in the collaboration area, and even develop new tools, more pervasive, more user-friendly. The impact on the environment as well as the well-being of employees would be dramatic.
Despite the availability of cheap and almost unlimited bandwidth, pervasive and outstanding collaboration tools, which enable people to share documents and even design new ones over the Internet without leaving their offices, I have noticed that working habits by and large haven’t changed much in the past 15 years. Despite all the talk about remote working, mobility, pervasive computing etc, most of the knowledge workers from our big cities around the globe are still doing the same stupid thing everyday: spend hours commuting from their leafy suburbs to the centre of town, or even the other way round. However, should we ask these people sitting at their desk why they have to be in the office, I think we would be very surprised to discover that, for a vast majority of them, the people they work with most of the time are not sitting next to them in the cubicle next door, but faraway. And even when they are located in a nearby building, chances are they will talk to eachother over the phone.
The benefit would be manyfold. High-tech companies would not only make revenue on this, but that would also provide them some sort of showcase for their new technologies, and they would also be able to benefit from this initiative to show that their ideas can have a positive impact on the environment. This would be a compelling living proof that technology can actually do something about the environment. Participating companies would also benefit from this idea because they will have to invest less in real estate, they would have more flexible workforces, and it has also been proven by IBM in a similar experiment in Paris, France (1995 and beyond) that on average employees were gaining 1 1/2 hours every day on travel time and that one of our out of this one hour and a half was reinvested in work and productivity (employees been keen to show that they don’t benefit from the system but are more productive.
(*) Confluence is one of the platforms made available to enterprises in order to set up internal wikis
You might believe that I’m getting obsessed with The Halo Effect, Phil Rosenzweig’s latest book (see previous article on the Ideo shopping-cart and the halo effect on his blog). To an extent I am ready to admit to it, but once again, I think this is an important book, one that everyone should read, because some of the things that are said in this book are really fundamental.
The Internet, once dubbed the land of the swift, and the now famous (or infamous depending on the point of view) web 2.0, can lead certain people to think that things are changing so fast, nothing is as it was before. I think this is the case for another halo effect. It is true that the Internet is making things happen at light speed. It is not true that the Internet supersedes normal business rules (we saw that during the bubble period a few years back), and it is not true either that absolutely dazzling new ideas come cropping up all the time.
More than often, older ideas are being recycled, and this is not a criticism. This is one of the paradoxes of innovation (from Latin innovare i.e. to make something new). It would be wrong to think that we can invent new things all the time. Besides, there are many examples where really good ideas can be recycled productively and effectively. As we have seen in previous articles, second life is the result of some sort of recycling of what Vivendi did – only clumsily – in the year 2000 and yesterday I was browsing the latest web 2.0 applications on facebook, and I came across a new website publicising the fact that they were launching a new ‘human’ search engine, a service with which actual people carry out Internet research or your behalf. Well, that’s a new idea isn’t it? Sorry guys, it’s not. Webhelp came up with something similar at the end of the 1990s, although a few years later they turned themselves into a normal contact centre operation company. Similarly, I wrote an article about Internet research way back 1999, which I updated slightly in 2003 (information tracking in the information age revisited, by Yann Gourvennec, 2003). Chances are you think that because Google is ubiquitous (their Mobile version is really astonishing too) and everybody uses it and it’s so easy to use and God knows it is easy to use, you do not need to know how to research things on the Internet. But I think that this article which I wrote 10 years ago is still mostly valid. Okay, some of the links there are obsolete now. But the way that we should organise an Internet search, the way that you select, graft and prune new Internet keywords in your search engine research entry box , should more or less remain the same, if you want to carry out a profitable Internet research campaign. It strikes me that because the Internet has become so pervasive, that everybody uses it and thinks they are so wise (in fact they’re not. Google’s engineers are!), it is really amazing to see how few people know how to actually research information properly. Finally the human search engine idea which was launched by Webhelp some 10 years ago and now is being recycled is a very apt and timely idea.
Indeed, novelty is something very relative, at the end of the day, what really matters is efficiency and it makes perfect sense that ideas, novel ideas which are not mature at the time of invention find a second life (no pun intended) a few years later. It is entirely natural, and entirely desirable.
So that’s the innovation paradox: that way of making new things out of old ideas. Real success, most of the time, does not always arise from absolutely dazzling new ideas, but from those that are really and effectively being implemented.
(almost) anybody interested in innovation knows about the IDEO process and the well-famed Ideo shopping cart video shot for ABC. It is indeed a staple for innovation seminars and a renowned example of faultless creativity methodology. In the ABC video (you can purchase it from ABC see link per below) you will see the IDEO team challenged about the re-design of a simple everyday object, the shopping cart. And the demonstration is compelling. Here’s an object we use on an everyday basis, that is almost universally used from one end of the planet to the other, and we hadn’t even thought about making it more user-friendly. Obvious isn’t it? And the Ideo team therefore redesign the aforementioned trolley in less than 2 days. Impressive, all the seminar attendees stand up and cheer, here’s an impressive process that leads to compelling results (see the finished trolley on the lefthand-side)!
At least that’s what I had thought too, maybe a bit naively, until I read the following critical articles for which I am providing links hereafter. Afterthoughts include questions such as “why wasn’t this shopping cart deployed after the show and why can’t we find it in shops?” and also “is the exercise real or is it artificial, namely at the beginning of the process when they start investigating the problem with cameras, are they doing it for real?”.
I was also pondering – whereas I have just started reading Rosenzweig’s latest opus – whether this wasn’t a case for a halo effect, i.e. “a tendency to make inferences about specific traits on the basis of a general impression” (The Halo Effect, p50). Yes, the video looks nice, and the people look brilliant and the process really seems to work fine. In just two days a new (supposedly) superior shopping cart was created but the real question is: what is really good design? Is it design that looks nice, or is it also about practicality for instance? (what about all these boxes on the cart, are they really so convenient? where do you store them? how do you pile the trolleys on one another etc.). Is it design (only) aimed at the end user or is it also aimed at shop-owners too? that’s an important part. In the video the onus is on the team to develop a shopping-cart that would be more convenient. But more convenient to whom? Can we assume that shop-owners aren’t worried about the cost of their trolleys, the way that they are stored, their lifespan? Besides, is the trolley issue the main issue, even for end-users? For instance, would clients rather pay more for food stored conveniently in a designer trolley or pay less for food piled up in a chicken-wire box on wheels?
These are open questions, but chances are that the answer lies in the fact that one cannot find these trolleys in our shops.
But mind you, don’t jump to the conclusion that the Ideo process doesn’t work either. Judging on just one example would simply be not enough. It would just be another halo effect.
Newsatseven is a new service which compiles and delivers news to you, direct from the Web and automatically generates a youtube news show with an Avatar (named Alyx Vance) . Below is the newscast from Newsatseven for June 19th, 2007 and it’s about the latest Harry Potter film. News archives are available here with more films to view. Newsatseven is entirely automatically generated and it claims that it is the future of the future; nothing less. The project is led by Nate Nichols and Sara Owsley, two computer Science graduate students at Northwestern University’s Intelligent Information Laboratory (InfoLab), under the supervision of Kristian Hammond, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the InfoLab. The blog is not really updated and I noticed too that the videos aren’t generated on week-ends. Maybe the future of the future is that machines will take a break on Saturdays and Sundays. Now, the result – if it is really automatic – is indeed flabbergasting but the only problem with artificial intelligence is that it really looks and sounds artificial. Still work on our plates to make machines look and talk like humans, but should we bother?
A brand new version of the Orange innovation whitepaper for business services – which I have co-authored with Jean-François Fava Verde – has just been made available (click here to download). This latest version of the whitepaper was distributed at Connect 2007, the worldwide event for Orange Business Services clients which took place in Lisbon on June 4-6, 2007. The event was extremely successful. Many break-out sessions (see photo on the left-hand side) took place on location, at the Corinthia Hotel Lisbon, and Innovation was on the agenda of many a presentation by our top Execs. The whitepaper was widely distributed (many thanks to Mark Wigington, our VP for IT services, for his renewed support) and our break-out session was also extremely successful and triggered interesting discussions with clients about how to handle and foster innovation jointly. The break out that Jean François and I had organised with the help of Orange Labs and our partner 123interview was also a success.
The climax of that presentation was an interactive session where we asked attendees to show us their vision of innovation through a survey which contained 4 main sets of questions: 1) about our clients’ views on the lifespan of innovation (from short to long term, what I have also called the ‘innometer’) 2) about our clients’ 3 most important business issues where innovation could play a role 3) about the 3 main technologies which were on our clients’ radar screen in order to solve their business issues (hence question 2) 4) about how favourable or unfavourable our clients were with regard to working jointly with one of their vendor. But it was no ordinary old fashioned paper-based survey, nor even was it a plain-vanilla online Internet survey.
Ubiquitous computing has been on the agenda for a while now. This concept was in fact created by the much regretted Mark Weiser from Xerox PARC in the 1970′s (see a reprint of the founding article, the computer of the 21st century here). It was really visionary. Many would sneer at the concept but look at it: Tablet PC’s have already been on the market for at least 4 or 5 years. They haven’t been hugely successful but the concept is still evolving. Pda’s are now in their prime and evolving to become a) smartphones and b) ultramobile PCs such as the amazing HTC advantage which was released in April 2007 with a brand new flash-memory disk and a windows mobile OS which enables to turn the machine on and off instantly (still too expensive though at €1000 per unit) or even c) the astounding ‘cellular book‘ by Polymer Vision. I will also recommend an article found on Time magazine describing Paul Allen’s latest UMPC initiative called Flipstart: A Billionaire’s Bet, the mini computers war.
All these initiatives are in a way derived from Weiser’s vision of the ubiquitous computer, some thirty years ago. unfortunaltely, none of them has really clinched it yet for us to throw away our clunky laptops and be able to connectly and work and entertain ourselves freely, on the move, at a reasonable price. But there is that sense though that we are getting there soon and that we will soon get a computer of the 22nd century at a reasonable price.
Although this is a world premiere, I am not quite sure that this new attempt at reviving the defunct epaper initiative is extremely compelling. Earlier versions of such contraptions had already been launched at the heart of the 2000 bubble and already, we could perceive that there was a glitch somewhere in this great marketing scheme: for a start, specific devices were required, and they were costly. Once you had invested in such contraptions they could not be turned into anything else. Secondly, the content was poor and rare. Thirdly, these devices were ugly, bulky and heavy. Fourth, the targeted segment for such widgets is already fully equipped with pda’s, smartphones, lightweight laptops, Tablet pc’s, UMPC’s and the like. I remember a lady from the national institute for reseach and agronomics (INRA) showing me that device at the time and she spent all the time trying to tell me it was a great thing that one was able to read stuff on a screen (in fact, brightness and battery life was also an issue on those device). Um! I showed her my pda and she was gobsmacked and couldn’t even understand what it was. Now I am under the impression that this attempt is another desperate kiss of life for the little desired bulky e-reader. The device is pricy (€600-€700+ depending on the model you chose), it’s huge and non versatile and the yearly subscription for content ssems quite overpriced (€365 ie €1 a day, ie no incentive to bypass the practical paper version worth €1.20 which I buy from the kiosk every now and then). I find it very disappointing, and expectations raised at 3GSM by Cellular reader and Telecom Italia are this time again falling flat. Will we ever get rid of all this waste of paper? Isn’t it frustrating?
Is this another sign of the times, the after-shock after 10 years of Dilbertish hard-talk against managers or just the result of a profound transformation of the employment landscape? It’s probably hard to tell exactly but last december, the FT came up with an interesting article about how managers were perceived in this day and age. According to FT’s Stefan Stern, when 50 bright mba students were asked how they would describe themselves, they chose titles such as ‘catalysts’ or ‘change-agents’ but refused to be regarded as ‘managers’. To them, almost everybody else is a manager and besides, if it means anything to anyone, being called a manager wasn’t associated with a particular good image of human activity: “When some of our catalysts and change-agents were pressed on what they understood by the term manager, they said it conjured up for them an image of a person who was probably not terribly imaginative or bright. One declared that a manager was someone who was “bossy, weak and insecure, who tries to intimidate people and does not contribute to the bottom line“.
To get back to my earlier question at the beginning of this post, I think that such astonishing results are indeed a sign of the times. They are a sign that management is evolving from this frozen image inherited from the military into this much more intricate notion of cross-functional management which is – by nature – required from modern flexible and information-based organisations. Project-based, peer-to-peer collaboration is what is required by companies which need to reposition themselves swiftly and move faster in a more globalised world. At the end of the day, young ‘managers’, or should we call them ‘symbolic analysts’ like Charles Handy in Trust and the Virtual Organisation have not only learned how to adapt to always changing and flexible situations, they have also begun to get used to that fact and now they even like the new status better than they do the old one. William Bridges had warned us in 1995 with ‘Jobshift’ of which one can find a summary here. A little more than ten years later, one can say now that the lansdcape has really changed. We are no longer in a period of mass redundancies and growth is sustained; even though the American house market has slumped, economists today – except Alan Greenspan – deny that this is going to have a negative impact on the World’s economy. Despite this phase of continued growth, our economy is constantly under pressure to do better, more and also differently, forcing all layers of the labour force – not just workers or employees – to adapt to that pressure.
I believe that such funcdamental changes in the structure of work and on the aspirations of young professionals is also a source of motivation for people to work differently, ie to cooperate. In traditional hierarchical organisations, the need to cooperate is meagre. One just has to way for instructions and execute them. On the contrary, in a world of cross-organisational initiative, noone is giving you instructions and if you want to solve your problems and propose new solutions – unless you can do it alone and let’s face it few people can – one has to ask others for help and guidance.
To a large extent, I see examples like the one shown in this FT article, more than anything else, as a living proof that cooperation is happening and why it is happening across the board and why there is such a requirement for people to exchange ideas and help and also to equip themselves with the tools supporting collaboration.
Howard Rheingold’s vision of ‘the guy in the basement‘ who is the one responsible for innovation is becoming reality. I have attached a great article in which Rheingold depicts the importance of collaboration and how people can actually re-shape the corporate world in which we live, and for some of us, barely survive. (download the source of innovation – Howard Rheingold).
Now in a businessweek article are living examples of how people are actually changing the world from the bottom-up. Only 2 years ago, when Jérôme Delacroix from Cooperatics first talked to me about wikis I had been very intrigued. Then I tried to set up a wikiweb by myself but did not really manage to get people interested or at least not as much as I had managed with my legacy website and now with all my blogs. Now I can realise how much the world has changed in a very short period of time. The phenomenon has even been granted a name by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams: Wikinomics, i.e. economics revisited by collaboration. Today I have a wiki back in the office, which I populate and which I use everyday to foster innovation internally and get people to cooperate for business, and I also use this blog to populate the wiki and the forums and the rest of it (innovating from the outside in). What Charles Handy was writing about the virtual organisation 12 years ago was really visionary; not that I ever doubted it of course, but it’s reached scales never attained before.
Web design used to be simple and straightforward. 10 years ago, all you needed to do was to buy David Siegel’s webdesign book and steer clear of all the pitfalls described on the ‘webpages that suck‘ website. So here’s an event to keep abreast of all the changes occurring in the webdesign sphere which will take place in London on April 17-18. Register online at http://www.futureofwebdesign.com/
Robert Sutton is delivering 8 tips to improve your brainstorming sessions in Businessweek. He is also quoting a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Brainstorming Works Best if People Scramble For Ideas on Their Own” (available here). This will remind our readers of another post where some Dutch researchers claimed that Group Brainstorming does not work well (is group creativity an illusion?). Sutton’s response to that claim is very clear and sets the records right: “[...] it is total nonsense to conclude that if you want creativity, you ought to keep your people in solitary confinement where they can’t “waste time” listening to and building on the ideas of others”. Continue reading
BPS Research published a paper on February 3rd, 2006 entitled “Why do we still believe in group brainstorming?“. According to psychologists, the so-called “illusion of group creativity” is overwhelming. Still, there is this widespread belief that when gathered in a group, people come up with better and/or more ideas than working on their own. Some Amsterdam psychologists carried out an experiment which aimed at proving that point. Working in groups lifts off the pressure from people who find it easier than working on their own. Feeling less stressed does not mean that you are more productive however. Group work increases participants satisfaction too by reassuring them that other group members are having difficulties to find new ideas too (a phenomenon dubbed ‘social comparison’. It also gives participants an illusion of creativity and performance through the generation of frantic collective activity. Such activity is also less stressful than being left with writer’s block in front a blank page with no ideas. [link to Bernard Nijstad's bio].
UTA Professor Paul B. Paulus insists that “Group members do not have a good sense of the effectiveness of groups”. He believes that some of the problems shown in group creativity experiments can be solved via direct exchange of ideas through “computers or writing”. More information on Group creativity and links to other pages are available on Pr Paulus’s web page.
Very often, I hear people say that you have to make your end-user’s lives easier to generate a marketing success. However paved with good intentions this statement may be, I did ask myself the question whether making users’ live easier is a sustainable marketing argument for the development of a business. Here are my thoughts on this subject:
A brand new version of the Orange innovation whitepaper for business services – which I have co-authored with Jean-François Fava Verde – 
Howard Rheingold’s vision of ‘the guy in the basement‘ who is the one responsible for innovation is becoming reality. I have attached a great article in which Rheingold depicts the importance of collaboration and how people can actually re-shape the corporate world in which we live, and for some of us, barely survive. 
BPS Research published a paper on February 3rd, 2006 entitled “
