As he said in Austin, artists are becoming much like sex workers — once you’ve scored a record deal, “you’re just the fresh stripper.” Sensationalism aside, his point is that both artists and fans must assume responsibility for the future of music if it is to mean something more than viral videos and hit singles. This is about engagement. This is about sustained relevance.

Mit den Möglichkeiten der Vernetzung im Web erhöht sich allerdings die Wahrscheinlichkeit enorm, auf kluge und weise Menschen zu stoßen, die einen hilfreichen Beitrag zu einem Thema leisten können. Es reduziert die Möglichkeiten der Meinungsdiktatoren in Wirtschaft, Politik und Medien, Wissen zu horten und über monopolisiertes Wissen Macht auszuüben. Das Ganze ist unglaublich anstrengend. Wer sich gegen die vielen Stimmen im Netz durchsetzen will, muss sehr gute Argumente haben und ein wahrer Überzeugungskünstler sein beim Bohren dicker Bretter, wie es Max Weber formuliert hat. Bedenkenträger sind aber unverzichtbar, um Innovationen und neue Ideen durchzusetzen

Capturing the chaos of the design process and forging ahead with a narrow and precise path of action is becoming ever easier thanks the product development solutions out there. It’s no longer a problem to have multiple users around the table creating a product – now that the wealth of information co-design produces can be quickly filtered, aligned with requirements and developed.

The Hackerspaceshop was found in early 2012 by Florian 'overflo' Bittner with a lot of support from the community at metalab , a hackerspace in central Vienna, Austria.

Parts of this article made me think of this second memo. I am dubious about the whole idea of "managing innovation" in any sense beyond trying to not stifle innovation. Part of me thinks it's folly to speak of a "...consistent, predictable and sustainable path for innovation.", the same kind of folly evinced by the 2nd silly memo above. I think that Mr. Stikeleather has some sense of this himself when he calls innovation a "social art" and writes that managers can be "clouds of suppression". This weeks NY Times Book Review had a book about Bell Labs. AT&T's encouragement of innovation seemed to be just encouraging everyone to run into everyone else, and mixing theoreticians with engineers. I'm not convinced that you can do much more than that, save maybe get the hell out of the way. Mr Stikeleather may be onto something when he speaks of a need for "mastery of organization", that is something that managers can do for innovators. I don't know that I can innovate on a timetable or schedule, that does not seem like a good idea. At Bell labs they just let people follow their thoughts, some led to nothing productive, others changed the world.

The traditional model of innovation begins with an R&D group that gets together in a lab and starts working on ideas. And of course, a lot of innovation has come out of that model. (Likewise, plenty of failure.) But the model is changing. More ideas, more products, and more projects are being developed openly, and different ways of collaborating are emerging. TopCoder and InnoCentive are two companies, both now ten years old, that are making that happen.

Gangplank has put members on nearly every board and commission in the city and started work directly with economic development to show the power of the manifesto.  A list of ideals,values and principles that the creatives of the city put forth to make a difference.  collaboration over competition community over agendas participation over observation doing over saying friendship over formality boldness over assurance learning over expertise people over personalities

Elements of Innovation Competence As is the case with Innovation Commitment, we don’t have a system yet for quantifying Innovation Competence. While the core metric should be something like how many new ideas you execute and diffuse successfully, here are some questions you can ask to assess where you currently are along this dimension:

How many new ideas do you successfully execute and diffuse?

Are you good at all the components of the idea management process?

Do you practice different forms of innovation?

Do you practice both small and large innovation?

Do you have an innovation portfolio

Does your firm have a culture of systematic experimentation?

Does your firm learn from failure?

“Amazon has not had great margins,” Jason Helfstein, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Company. “One has to believe they looked at this and thought, ‘Why not just own it and take all the technology in house?’” The acquisition comes as Amazon aggressively adds distribution centers to service its growing consumer base.

Failure to create some form of predictability will result in chaos. Failure to create some sort of well-maintained Barbaric chaos inside the company guarantees that a fast-moving, ambitious, risk-taking and ruthless someone else - someone outside the company will invade, because they know what you forgot: hacking is important.

Brown has continued her work on vulnerability and she shares a few insights now. Firstly, that it is not a weakness. This, she says, is a profoundly dangerous and pervasive myth. Secondly, that in order to understand the relationship between vulnerability and courage, we need to talk about shame. Jungian analysts call shame the “swampland of soul,” a lyrical construct that helps illuminate why it’s important to spend time on the topic, hardly one most of us care to dwell on. But, she says, in order to have a compelling conversation around race, we need to talk about privilege, which is all wrapped up in shame. In order to have a compelling conversation around healthcare, we need to understand that surgeons’ self-worth is stitched up in being all-powerful. All-powerful people don’t need checklists or make mistakes. We need to recognize and understand deep-rooted shame at the heart of any broken system if we are ever to change it.

So if you believe in the principles behind UNIX and Open Source, please don't write software which requires any of the Gnome/KDE and DBus API. Writing X11 programs with xcb and proper RPC APIs like SUNRPC or Thrift should be more than good enough. So, please support choice and freedom by implementing programs the right way instead of the Linux/Gnome/DBus way.

Gerne wird Social Media im Personalmanagement von manchen Medienvertretern und Dienstleistern schon wieder totgeschrieben. Die W&V-Redaktion titelte dabei schön reißerisch “Die Web 2.0 Party ist vorbei” und Eva Zils vom Online-Recruiting Blog nahm dies zum Anlass einen passenden Artikel zur Frage vom Ende der Social Media Recruiting Party zu stellen. Bitte beide Artikel genau lesen, zuhören und erst einmal über die Zukunft von Social Media nachdenken.

Why indeed? Because too many people still work in organizations that resemble the IBM of their grandfather's (or great-grandfather's) day--organizations designed to exert tight control at the expense of autonomy, to maximize compliance and conformance over individual expression and discretion, and to promote top-down command over passion-driven performance.

An Unorthodox Way To Release A Comedy Special

C.K. asked his fans to contribute $5 directly to him via PayPal, in exchange for two streams and two downloads of the unencrypted, high-definition show. He explains that he chose the unorthodox method of sharing his special to see if releasing a video himself could potentially make money.

“What is really striking in the study,” says, Nicolai Foss, “is that the influence from external knowledge to innovation performance is fully mediated by organizational practices. We hadn’t expected the organizational dimension to be this important. To us, this strongly suggests that firms need to think very consciously about they gear their organization for the absorption and use of externally held knowledge”.

google sendet mit dem redesign des readers ein klares signal an die loyalen benutzer (aka nerds):

1. ihr seid uns scheissegal. auf euch können wir keine rücksicht nehmen, wir müssen nun an das grosse ganze denken. und das grosse ganze ist unser tolles google+. das funktioniert zwar noch nicht so super, ist noch immer leicht behindert (kein RSS, keine saubere, einfache möglichkeit inhalte auf fremde oder google-eigene plattformen zu transferieren (API), kaum filtermöglichkeiten ausser „circles“), aber na und? fresst oder geht sterben (exportiert euren scheiss doch einfach).

I specifically remember being excited about the launch of Google Calendar in 2006 because Google was a company cranking out hit after hit after hit. Great products. But recently, what have they done?

You can argue that Android is pretty solid now, but that’s after years of iteration. At first, it basically sucked. Chrome has been great, but it now seems to be getting more buggy, not less, over time. Google Voice? Decent, but not what it should be. Google+? Not bad, but issues. Google TV? Yeah. Google Music? Ha. Google Wave? Sigh. Etc, etc, etc.

That’s maybe my biggest problem with Google. They release something, and I no longer have any faith that it’s going to be any good. It’s hard to get excited about a company like that. It’s the same reason why it’s hard to get excited when Microsoft and Yahoo release new things. The track record just isn’t there any more. The faith is gone.

One of the tips he shares is the importance of looking outside your industry to solve problems. He goes further in his book about changing the way you innovate and think about innovation. One surprise I found in the book is to stop using a suggestion box. Stephen goes to explain that they frequently don’t work, waste time and the ideas can oftentimes be answers to questions that no one asked.

Das Erstlingswerk des weltberühmten Architekten und Bauhaus-Gründers Walter Gropius. Dessen Glasfassade mit den durchsichtigen Gebäudeecken das sachliche, internationale Bauen vorwegnahm. Ein Schlüsselbau der Moderne.

five forces that will shape work and careers:

ever greater globalization of innovation and talent;
the development of ever more sophisticated connective technologies;
profound changes in demography and longevity which will see many live until they are 100 and others live in regions where 40% of the population are over 50;
broad societal forces that will see trust in institutions decrease and families become ever more re-arranged; and finally,
the impact that carbon use and Co2 will have on how we think about our own consumption patterns.
Taking this rich cocktail of forces into consideration here are my 10 tips about skills, networks and choices.

(This is part of HBR's Collaboration Insight Center.)

"I can't do that! I would receive thousands of ideas!" said Alberto Alessi, CEO of the Italian company that's famous for the design of its home products. "Well, isn't that exactly the point?" I replied. I was interviewing Alessi, together with Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano, about the potential of the new forms of collaborations enabled by the web.

Alessi is well known for his collaborations with a network of more than 200 external designers. For Alessi, the quality of collaborations is crucial. Quality means that he carefully identifies the most promising talented designers. Collaborations come first; ideas then follow. Indeed, building selective collaborations takes most of his time.

But now, with the help of the web, he could easily reach for a broader pool of ideas. The company could, for example, post on its website a competition for the design of a new corkscrew or teapot. And given the company's significant brand reputation, a copious flow of ideas would certainly pour in. Alberto Alessi, however, was not excited about this opportunity.

Yet nowadays many executives and scholars are interested in the potential offered by the web to leverage crowds of creative people (users, developers, designers). They look for ways to have more ideas. And the web, for example through innovation marketplaces such as Innocentive, makes it possible to rapidly build collaborations with a large number of contributors.

Who is right: Alessi, with his focus on the quality of selected collaborations, or the advocates of crowdsourcing, with their focus on the quantity of collaborations?

As Gary Pisano and I discussed in our HBR article "Which Kind of Collaboration Is Right for You?," my feeling is that the quality and quantity of collaborations serve different purposes.

A large quantity of collaborations is useful to create ideas. The larger the number of collaborations, the higher the number of opportunities that you can tap into and the higher the likelihood that a great idea may knock your door.

High-quality collaboration is useful when it comes to make sense of all these opportunities. Highly skillful collaborators can help you to better interpret this wealth of insights, to recognize the value of ideas that is not often visible at first, especially when it comes to radical change, and to identify a novel strategic direction.

If quantity is good for creating ideas, quality is good for setting a vision.

Some may think that quantity can be a substitute for quality. For example, the crowd could also help you to sort out the opportunities and select the best ideas. This, however, works when you need to solve a clearly defined problem (e.g. how to boil water faster in a tea kettle) and therefore it is easy to rank ideas. Or when you want to predict what the crowd will like (for example Threadless.com, a website selling T-shirts, leverages the web community to select the best designs.

However, when you need to set a new vision, reframe a problem, or search for a radical innovation, quantity will hardly help you find a direction. (Actually, as Alessi says, too many insights from too many collaborations may create even more confusion and noise.) Here is where carefully selected collaborators who have great talent can help you to identify the weak signals outside of the mainstream and make sense of a rich yet confused landscape of ideas.

Well, you would say, then we need both: a lot of good quality collaborations. It might be. But leadership is a matter of focus and priorities. And with our recent focus on crowdsourcing, our attention to building selective collaborations has withered. Yet, the more the web helps us develop collaborations in quantity and receive thousands of ideas, the more the real difference will come from the quality of closely selected collaborations that we will develop, and that will help us to make sense of this wealth of opportunities.

Roberto Verganti is the author of Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean and has pioneered research on the intersection of strategy, design, and technology management. He is a professor of management of innovation at Politecnico di Milano and a member of the Design Leadership Board of the European Commission. He has served as an executive advisor, coach, and educator at a variety of firms, including Ferrari, Ducati, Whirlpool, Xerox, Samsung, Hewlett-Packard, Barilla, Nestlè, Intuit, and STMicroelectronics.

Well this is getting a little repetitive, but it's always nice to add another voice to the (growing) crowd of people, who recognize that execution is much more important than the idea. We've discussed this many times and have pointed out people, such as Scott Adams, who have made similar points. The latest such example comes to us courtesy of the Capitalist Lion Tamer, who highlights a brief excerpt from Maxim and The Week creator Felix Dennis' new book, in which he makes the identical point about ideas and execution. He notes that an idea is not enough. It may be important, but ideas are more "like Nike sports shoes," in that they can be a tool that can be used by someone to accomplish great things, but in the end it's the actual execution that matters:

I have lost count of the number of men and women who have approached me with their “great idea,” as if this, in and of itself, was their passport to instant wealth. The idea is not a passport. At most, it is the means of obtaining one. In some instances, a fixation on a great idea can prove hazardous, distracting your attention from the perils and pitfalls
you will inevitably encounter on the narrow road.

If you never have a single great idea in your life, but become skilled in executing the great ideas of others, you can succeed beyond your wildest dreams. They do not have to be your ideas — execution is all. When confronted with a great idea, your reaction should be to scrupulously analyze its commercial potential in the context of your own ability to transform that potential into triumph.

Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does.

Doesn't it seem odd that so many people (and very, very successful people at that) recognize this basic concept... and yet our entire public policy around innovation focuses solely on rewarding the idea, at the expense of the execution?Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Ten years ago, Stanford professor Robert I. Sutton wrote a book on how to manage for maximum creativity called Weird Ideas That Work. After studying some of the most innovative people and companies, Sutton concluded that what is right for routine work is consistently wrong for creative work. The best way to manage for creativity, he discovered, is to simply take every tried-and-true management trope and do the opposite.  Armed with this epiphany, he laid out his "Weird Rules of Creativity."

The idea of an "organised" counter-culture is inherently ironic, since the harder a large group try to not conform, the more they end up conforming.

In our industry — advertising, marketing and media — there is no shortage of innovators who subsequently lost out to the next innovation. Why? Like Ken Olsen, they had a tendency, as well as a need, to focus on the business at hand. There were numbers to make, deadlines to meet, work to produce, clients to serve, awards to win. Of course this short-term mindset — a focus on current clients, an obsession with known competitors rather than emerging foes, and a determination to leverage existing competencies instead of developing new ones — was a deterrent to preparing for the future.

Agree that it is all about apps . However let's see in a year from now. Android Market already has caught up with App store on mobile. I'm sure they will also on tablets because with Google, Motorola, LG, Samsung, HTC and others pushing for this Android has a good chance to dominate the market. Robert you might want to read Clayton Cristensen books if you have not already: Innovator's dillema, Innovators solution. There you will see that history repeats itself all the time and that fully integrated solutions such as iPad, iPhone in the beginning are very successful but once the market becomes a commodity the winning strategy is where different manufacturers make components.

Graham’s rationale for Yahoo’s failure is put down essentially one thing; its lack of a “Hacker Culture”. It didn’t have brilliant engineers at the heart and soul of its organization and it tried to make do without keeping and attracting the best.

Don Norman, a former Apple vice-president, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, and one of the world’s most influential designers, discusses his new book, Living With Complexity. Norman talks about differences between complexity, something being complicated, and simplicity, and suggests that people who bemoan “technology” don’t actually seek simplicity. He also discusses differences between designing a product and designing a system, using examples of iPods and iTunes, the Amazon Kindle, and BMW’s Mini Cooper — products whose success depended upon the success of larger systems.

Bold innovations often take time. That’s why progress must be judged both in relation to the starting point as well as the final destination. For example, in America’s space program, the first successful docking of two orbiting spacecraft, the Gemini VIII capsule and the unmanned Agena target vehicle, took place on March 16, 1966. While this was an important milestone, it was still just an intermediate step in the long journey to land a human being on the moon. While the commander of Gemini VIII, Neil Armstrong, would ultimately walk on the moon, that wouldn’t happen until 1969.

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Wie oft denkt Ihr darüber nach, wie die technischen Spielzeuge und Arbeitsmittel Eures Alltags hergestellt werden? Und wie oft verdrängt Ihr den Gedanken ganz schnell, weil Ihr ahnt, dass das nicht so ideal aussieht? Die Gründe, warum wir ständig neue glänzende Gerätschaften kaufen sollen und können, sind vielfältig. Eine Ursache sind die beschissenen Arbeitsbedingungen derer, die sie zusammenbauen.

One of the benefits of using open source tools is that you can customize them to be used in ways that help your organization.

If you want to customize an open source tool, it may be simply a matter of handing it off to your IT department or hiring outside help. But what to do after you have a customized version of your software available?

The Open Source Ecosystem
The way that most proponents of open source tools hope you’ll move forward from that point is by sharing the customizations and changes your team has made and making them available for other users of that particular piece of software. Within your organization, there may be some arguments against doing just that. Some are legitimate: stripping out any information that would allow your competitors to learn about how you work from your customized software might be impractical, making it harder to protect your organization’s confidential information. Others may see the changes you made as proprietary, and that offering them for free is a waste of company resources.

Making those customizations available, however, can help you improve upon your chosen tool. The more users and developers are working on a given open source project, the less likely it is that development will stop — making it a useful investment for any organization relying on open source software.

The Core Developer Question
You could simply release your changes and customizations to the community that creates a particular tool, or you could take an active role in developing the tool in question, providing resources and help. There are certainly some benefits in taking a leadership role. You can help guide the development of your software, making it possible to implement key features that you may want. But taking a leadership role does take resources and time that you might otherwise dedicate elsewhere. It’s likely a question that only members of your organization can decide.

Of course, it’s very easy to get involved with most open source projects. The typical open source community can always use a few extra hands or a few extra dollars. If you make it clear that you’re interested in getting involved for the long haul, such communities will always find a way to bring you in and make use of whatever you can provide them with. It’s just a matter of deciding to get involved.

Does your organization actively support the open source projects it uses?

Image by Flickr user Ricardo Ferreira

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The main constraint in established organizations is not creativity. It’s innovation. In any big organization, there are tons of good ideas lying around and not being implemented. The bigger problem for established organizations is rather how to take the good ideas that they already have and get those accepted and implemented. Bottom line: for established firms, innovation is a bigger constraint than creativity.

My experience has been that if we stick with "storytelling" as the frame of reference, then we remain vulnerable to the CFO and his minions. We can win battles with "storytelling", but I'm trying to win the war and get sustainable change. For that purpose, I think we need a broader frame than "storytelling".

Visualizing a value proposition as a map of activities is useful for innovation managers because it helps to prioritize innovation projects. Again, when faced with a choice to allocate funding, it is more likely that investments is innovation in inventory management or modular furniture design will enhance the value proposition of the business because they are lynchpins within the activity map.

We are a team of IBMers in Ghana and Germany, who are working on the Business Blue Project “Smarter Global Collaboration“. Our main goal is to facilitate transnational collaboration between small and medium sized companies around the world, particularly between mature and emerging markets. Apart from our own experience as an international, virtually collaborating team, we will like to share this platform with you to share ideas and information.

Über Scott Berkun habe ich im Toolblog mehrmals geschrieben. Er ist Autor von “Bekenntnisse eines Redners: Oder die Kunst, gehört zu werden”, für mich eines der Bücher zum Thema Präsentation. Ein anderer Bestseller von ihm, der aber meines Wissens noch nicht in Deutsch erschienen ist, hat den Titel “The Myths of Innovation”. Titel est omen, hier geht es um richtige und falsche Annahmen zum Innovationsmanagement. Nun gibt es auch einen Webcast zu diesem Buch. Hier ist er:

Hier der Link zum Buch:

The Myths of Innovation: Scott Berkun: Englische Bücher

Eric von Hippel, a long-time affiliate with the Berkman Center, leads off our 2010 season of lunch talks with a discussion of “Household Sector” innovation. To explain his body of work, von Hippel explains that he’s tried to bring thinking about the communications space into the world of physical things, examining how processes we think of as affecting digital media can also apply to other forms of innovation.

topic of “how innovation works.” He argues that open collaboration, and end-user innovation, are competing with producer innovation in many economic sectors — and may, in fact, displace it. And the implications of that shift are as profound for the news media as they are for other institutions.

instead of facing what’s wrong with a program, some institutions display ‘Aggressive Institutional Denial’. In other words, the organizations act like there are no flaws in the program and criticism is just an attempt to derail the project. In denying improvement failure, most companies miss a vital point. Improvement and innovation cannot happen without failure. There are some basic ways to use failure to your advantage:

We aim to create a microblogging space including everyone and everything. Think of tweeting machines, sensors, software and business processes. This is Ubiquitous Microblogging.

Außenstehende empfinden die Abläufe bei CPP mitunter als recht befremdlich. Pflüger erzählt, ihm sei immer wieder prophezeit worden, sein System werde spätestens bei einer Größenordnung von zehn oder 15 Mitarbeitern kollabieren. "Selbst unser Steuerberater sagt immer: So etwas kann nicht funktionieren." Aber Pflüger glaubt an das Gleichheitsprinzip - obwohl er keine andere Firma kennt, die so arbeitet. Er ist der festen Überzeugung: "Das könnte auch bei einem Weltkonzern mit 20.000 Angestellten funktionieren." Wahrscheinlich ist er doch ein Idealist.

“Enterprise 2.0 wird nicht mehr aufzuhalten sein, wir sind überzeugt davon, dass das der richtige Weg ist und unser Management fragt auch schon nach. Aber es wird noch einige Monate (?) dauern bis der Rollout unserer strategischen IT-Plattform für die Zusammenarbeit im Unternehmen, für die wir uns schon vor einiger Zeit entschieden haben, abgeschlossen ist und wir hoffentlich im nächsten Schritt mit einem Upgrade auf das aktuelle Release dann Enterprise 2.0-fähig werden.”  So oder ähnlich hört man es heute in vielen Unternehmen, wenn man mit Vertretern des IT-Bereichs spricht.

Schade nur, dass die Kunden das nicht mitmachen. Mit der Vielfalt an Web 2.0-Technologien haben die Kunden unheimlich viel Macht in die Hand bekommen. Kunden haben damit häufig mehr Informationen als die eigenen Mitarbeiter. Kundenfeedback und Empfehlungen anderer werden Basis für die eigene Kaufentscheidung. Während eines Entscheidungsprozesses hört der Kunde nicht nur dem Unternehmen zu, sondern nutzt auch Informationen aus seinen sozialen Netzwerken. Welchen Informationen der Kunde mehr vertraut? Nun, ich, denke das ist eine rein formale Frage auf die die Antwort klar ist. Die Partizipationschancen der Kunden, die im Buch “Groundswell” von Charlene Li und Josh Bernoff in Form einer “Mitmach-Leiter” beschrieben wurden, werden längst genutzt.



Wenn aber die “Social Technographics“-Analysen zeigen, dass die Kunden die “Mitmach-Leiter” sozusagen nach oben klettern, wie agieren dann die Mitarbeiter in den Unternehmen? Zum Glück für viele Unternehmen sind die Mitarbeiter erfinderisch und warten nicht ab, bis der aktuelle Rollout und der dann kommende Upgrade abgeschlossen sind. Im Beitrag “IT in the Age of the Empowered Employee” im Harvard Business Review-Blog stellt Ted Schadler fest:

The same is true in the way employees are harnessing consumer technologies — social, mobile, video, and cloud. They’re improving how they do their jobs and solving your customer and business problems. And it’s not just a few employees; it’s a critical mass of employees.

Man kann den Schauder, der Managern und IT-Verantwortlichen bei dieser Feststellung über den Rücken läuft, spüren. Wie sieht es denn dann mit der Informationssicherheit, dem Datenschutz, der Compliance aus? Wie können wir Kontrolle über solche Aktivitäten außerhalb unseres Firewalls und der unserer Corporate Policies behalten? Da müssen wir doch schnell reagieren, sollen wir also den Zugang zu Facebook, Google Docs, YouTube, Slideshare, Prezi, Dropbox usw. sperren und jede Aktivität im Social Web bis auf Weiteres untersagen?

“Legalize it, don’t criticize it” würde wohl Bob Marley denen zurufen. Managementpraktiker orientieren sich möglicherweise eher an Ansätzen wie KAIZEN und rufen sich in Erinnerung, dass nützliche Prozessverbesserungen und schrittweise Innovationen immer von denjenigen kommen, die der Aufgabenstellung, der Herausforderung oder dem Problem am nächsten sind. Und genau darum geht es. Wenn Mitarbeiter ohne offizielle Genehmigung sozusagen im Do-It-Yourself-Modus IT-Werkzeuge einsetzen, dann geschieht das in der Regel mit der Zielsetzung, ihren Job besser machen und geschäftliche Probleme lösen zu wollen. Ted Schadler und Josh Bernoff nennen in ihrem Buch “Empowered” solche Mitarbeiter HEROes – “Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives”. HEROes fühlen sich befähigt, ihre eigenen Probleme  und Herausforderungen zu lösen (die kulturelle Dimension) und haben mindesten zwei Applikationen, die nicht von ihrem  Arbeitgeber autorisiert sind, heruntergeladen und nutzen diese regelmäßig bzw. besuchen regelmäßig mindestens zwei  Webseiten, die eine Anmeldung erfordern, aber nicht vom Unternehmen offiziell autorisiert sind (die praktische Dimension). Nicht ungewöhnlich ist, dass die Mitarbeiter solche Technologien auf eigene Kosten einsetzen. Beispielsweise nutzen 23% der HEROes ein Smartphone für die Arbeit und etwas mehr als die Hälfte hat dieses privat beschafft und zahlt auch die Gebühren selbst.

HEROes existieren, weil Technologien wie Twitter, Online-Netzwerke, Cloud-Anwendungen und -Services, Mobile Apps usw. einfach zu bedienen und preisgünstig zu nutzen sind. Den empirischen Untersuchungen zufolge, stellen die HEROes bereits heute eine kritische Masse dar:

20% aller Informationsarbeiter,
35% der Mitarbeiter aus den Marketing- und Vertriebsbereichen und
37% der Mitarbeiter aus der Technologie- und Servicebranche

nutzen verfügbare Technologien und Websites/Portale aus dem Consumer-Markt für ihre Arbeit (Stichwort: “Consumerization of IT”) und schaffen dadurch für die Unternehmen Prozessverbesserungen und innovative Lösungen.

Intelligente Unternehmen lassen es zu, dass ihre Mitarbeiter mit diesen Technologien experimentieren, schaffen aber gleichzeitig Umfeld des Gebens und Nehmens zwischen den Mitarbeitern, den Managern und der IT.

Josh Bernoff und Ted Schadler gehen dabei von einer Vereinbarung (“HERO Compact“) zwischen den drei Gruppen aus, die erforderlich ist, um technologische Innovationen im Unternehmen einzuführen:

Die Mitarbeiter stimmen zu, ihre Innovationen in einem geschäftlichen und sicheren Rahmen durchzuführen. Sie verhalten sich verantwortungsvoll und die Aktivitäten stehen im Einklang mit der Unternehmensstrategie. Sie arbeiten mit dem Management und der IT zusammen und berücksichtigen Sicherheits-, rechtliche und andere Regelungen des Unternehmens.

Das Management ermutigt zu einem innovativen Verhalten und organisiert das Risikomanagement. Dazu muss das Management die Technologien selbst kennenlernen und in Zusammenarbeit mit der IT die Risiken verstehen und reduzieren.

Die IT unterstützt die HERO-Projekte, indem sie eng mit den Mitarbeitern zusammenarbeitet und diese bei technologischen Themen unterstützt. Im Hinblick auf das Risikomanagement arbeitet die IT mit den Managern zusammen und stellt für diese Informationen bereit, um mögliche Risiken im geschäftlichen Kontext verstehen zu können. Die IT hilft, HERO-Projekte mit einer größeren Reichweite zu erkennen und deren Ergebnisse in breiterer Form nutzbar zu machen.

Lessons Learned: Die Mitarbeiter selbst sind die Lösung, wenn es darum geht, sinnvolle Einsatzmöglichkeiten für neue IT-Werkzeuge zu finden und kein Kunde wird solange warten, bis ein Unternehmen mit seinen Überlegungen zum Umgang mit den neuen IT-Werkzeugen fertig ist und deren strukturierte Einführung angegangen wird. Also gilt es, Wege zu finden, Innovationen und innovatives Verhalten im Unternehmen zu initiieren und nutzbar zu machen. Dazu müssen die Risiken erkannt und sinnvoll auf diese eingegangen werden, ohne aber gleichzeitig das Unternehmen reaktionsunfähig zu machen. Ted Schadler fasst es so zusammen:

It’s the HERO employees you need to find and support. Strike a new deal with them: You will help them with technology solutions that safely scale up to the enterprise if they accept responsibility for keeping you in the loop, funding the technology, managing the business risk and educating employees on appropriate use. It’s this new contract between IT, managers and employees that makes empowerment possible.

Ryan Freitas recently wrote a post called 35 Lessons in 35 Years – there are some good tips here. One that particularly caught my eye is this one:

Debates over terminology and semantics are for archivists and academics. If you’re interested in the living heart of what you do, focus on building things rather than talking about them.

We often think that innovation is all about new stuff, but I think that Freitas’ advice is sound – our innovation will be more successful if we focus on building. That’s part of why we talk so much about the importance of having a bias towards action.

Personally, I’m trying to build a network of people that use innovation to make both work and the world a better place – my hope is that through my work I can contribute to that.

What are you building?

(the Watercube under construction – picture from flickr/xiaming under a Creative Commons License)

via blogs.forrester.com
“I define co-creation as "the act of involving consumers directly, and in some cases repeatedly, in the product creation or innovation process." [Doug Williams]

It shows how new business model can reinvent an industry. It’s pretty easy to see how the auto industry will change enormously if this approach works. It also demonstrates how all of the elements of a business model need to be integrated.

how dedicated spaces can encourage new, more open creativity and innovation. I was shown in Innovation Works how labs could be designed to take you away from work and think differently. Even the transition from an 'old outside/exterior' building to a completely different 'very new interior' was designed deliberately.

I could see, through the techniques used in both centres, how these centres help organizations to the next big thing. I enjoyed working on innovative white glass walls with 'rich picturing' and I especially enjoyed learning how this technique connects you directly to your feelings/emotions.

I was reminded in both centres about fun, smiling, being less judgemental and relaxing.

I was already familiar with the techniques of 'divergent and convergent' thinking to expand ideas and then focus them on particular areas, and in both centres I enjoyed working with 'anonymous software' for idea creation and even voting.

There were plenty of high profile people at the Economist event in March, but hands down the best session was a simple interview with Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar.

Martin Giles from the Economist did the interview, and did an excellent job letting Catmull cover some excellent territory.

When you’re trying to improve innovation, the first thing to consider is people. Who should be involved in our innovation processes? Do we want to include ideas from outside our organisation? Who is connected to whom? How can we improve the connective structure of our networks? How is information flowing through our organisation? Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Ftimkastelle.org%2Fblog%2F2010%2F04%2Finnovation-concentrate-on-people-and-process-not-tools%2F%3Futm_source%3Dfeedburner%26utm_medium%3Dfeed%26utm_campaign%3DFeed%253A%2BInnovationLeadershipNetwork%2B%2528Innovation%2BLeadership%2BNetwork%2529

There will always be a market for Apple’s bright and shiny new stuff, and a lot of people will think it’s a pain-in-the-patoot because of its proprietary nature. The open tablets will dominate sales soon, but Apple will continue to make a sweet little retail device. If you can stomach a locked-in relationship with AT&T why not buy Apple?

But this piece here has less substance than the “Cloud 2″ it is promoting.

one of the worst parts about the “cloud” term is that it means different things to everyone and I’m afraid in the case of this article it doesn’t mean much. Renaming part of already an ill defined concept because you perceive a shift is stupid if you want anyone to know what you’re talking about.

Cloud services ALLOW light client devices like a tablet, but that doesn’t somehow force everyone into a new computing category. Especially when the light hardware that does less is more expensive than a powerful desktop. How successful would the PC revolution have been if they were more expensive than buying your own super-computer terminal server?

Lately many more people are talking and writing about the application of design thinking to intangible problems, design not only as a verb but as a way of — as Herbert Simon wrote — improving situations. I felt a need to review what has been said and define the term for myself before I could put it into use. Ways of thinking are always difficult to define, but I’m reminded of how Lao Tzu said “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao” yet he still managed to write a book about it.

Based on a review of writing on the topic, I have synthesized for myself what I understand design thinking to be…

to really benefit from design thinking, to create products and services that delight customers, an organization has to build design into their DNA, like many of the world’s most innovative companies have done

Sun was sued numerous times – most big companies are sued almost constantly by entities or actors whose sole focus is suing others. Groups with no business focus other than litigating patent suits are affectionately known as trolls – pure litigation entities. (For good humor, read this, an application to patent the act of trolling. If granted, it would give the patent holder a reciprocal claim against a patent troll.)

hmm, I like Umair and all but this ain't right IMHO

Was nur gar nicht funktioniert: Buzz direkt nach dem ersten Login verfluchen ist wie einen Menschen im Vorbeigehen komplett beurteilen zu wollen. In ein Auto kann man auch beim ersten Mal nicht einsteigen und direkt damit fahren. Man muss sich erstmal damit beschäftigen und, leider kommt der Mensch hier nicht drumherum, vergleichen ist auch eine schlechte Idee. Ich habe heute schon zu oft Dinge lesen müssen, dass Leute meinte, dass es kein Twitter oder kein Facebook sei, oder ZU Facebook sei. Aber wie auch bei anderen Diensten gilt: Es gibt immer einen Anwendungsfall. Wenn Ihr nicht dieser Fall seid, lasst es sein.

All organizations need a new position: a provocateur (or director) of systemic innovation. The role of this individual is to specifically challenge which regular organizational activities no longer make sense and to recast policies in light of the affordances of networked technology. Many organizational policies and work routines reflect the trailing ideologies of a previous generations – a different society, a different set of needs. Innovation and adaptation are in order.

"Read the whole thing. This is a great discussion by someone on the ground, detailing ow hard it can be to get people to adapt to new technology.

Different organizations have different rates that innovation diffuses through them. Many do absolutely nothing to facilitate this diffusion in any way. It just happens by essentially ad hoc means.

I’ve written about how change and innovations traverse a community. A better way to facilitate such things is to put disruptive innovators and mediating early-adopters in place to evaluate new technologies. That is what they are really good at and actually enjoy. If they see the value, especially the mediators, they can often speed up the rate the new technology diffuses."

Design Thinking as a Path to Innovation

Though the subtitle of the book is “How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation,” what Brown is actually proposing in this book goes far beyond offering advice for keeping your business on the leading edge of innovation. He’s talking about a new ethos in how we operate as a society. That concept feels pretty big, so it’s packaged as a business innovation book instead in order to overcome the challenge of getting you to open it. Not that you’re being tricked – it IS about innovation, but it’s extended beyond the scope of designing products and services to encompass the way we design the systems in which we live.

None of these are new to many of us from the consumer-centric world. However, enterprises are taking a slower path to adoption and IBM is trying to convince them that they should continue trusting IBM even for their SaaS needs. In fact, soon they will be releasing a collaborative app similar to Google Wave and offer support for LotusLive mobile from iPhone.

Die meisten Ideen brauchen ein weiter als gedachtes Umfeld, um zu gedeihen. Die Erfinder sind in der Mehrzahl blind dafür und denken sich, die Umgebung entstehe von allein.