by Roger Dennis

Video – in praise of innovation constraints

In Switzerland a tiny village of 80 people spent just CHF10,000 and gained over CHF2.4million of media exposure from a very simple marketing campaign.  I love this story as it shows that you don’t need to spend the bank in order to get great results – often it’s the reverse.  Limited resources force you to think more creatively and the results can far exceed what you’d create if you had an unlimited budget.  Enjoy the video…

Jung von Matt/Limmat: Obermutten. A little village goes global. – YouTube.

by Roger Dennis

Phones created multiplayer games in real worlds

 

 

File this under “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

Using the viewfinders of their smartphones, gamers can view paranormal activity layered over their surrounding environment and join a massive multi-player game that requires completing location-based missions and casting spells on real-world locations. Missions are generated in any real world location, asking players to complete challenges in order advance the story line, gain new spells, and earn status points. The game can be played anywhere in the world, enabling multiple players to compete and collaborate in the global battle between good and evil.

Read more about this fascinating combination of technologies in an interview with the developers at PSFK here: Game Creates Worldwide Zombie Hunt Using Augmented Reality.

by Roger Dennis

Resources for Leadership NZ Workshop attendees

This post is for attendees of the workshop for Leadership NZ on 28 Oct.  It’s a list of resources that may be of use when thinking about different ways to think about the future, and how to tell your story.  Firstly, here’s a list of organisations that think about the future, and share that thinking:

  • Shell energy scenarios can be accessed here.
  • The Institute for the Future in California publishes a wide range of information, including it’s Maps of the Decade.
  • The team from the Ministry of Trade and Industry in the Singapore Government do some outstanding work.  they blog here and publish in a range of places, including here.
  • The Sustainable Future Institute has a robust and fascinating series of publications that address the future of NZ, and you can access them via the website here.

With regards to telling rich stories that resonate, here’s a list of the links I referenced in my presentation:

 

 

 

 

by Roger Dennis

For Bright Ideas, Ask the Staff (WSJ article on crowdsourcing innovation)

Crowdsourcing innovation internally can be extremely productive for large organisations. Over the last year I’ve started to work very closely with Spigit – a US company that has the leading tool in the innovation crowdsourcing market. Late last year the Wall Street Journal had a nice summary of why organisations are buying into the idea of innovation from within:

It’s often the employees—rather than outside consultants—who know a company’s products and processes best. According to management experts, many of the most innovative companies tend to solicit ideas from staff throughout the organization, not just the executive ranks.

But it’s often hard for rank and file workers to be heard: Research has found that the average U.S. employee’s ideas, big or small, are implemented only once every six years, says Alan G. Robinson, a professor at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Now though, more companies are realizing the value of their workers’ input. Spurring the process are so-called innovation-management programs such as BrainBank Inc., InnoCentive Inc. and Spigit Inc., which help companies set up online idea-submissions systems in which employees can enter, comment and vote on ideas.

Spigit was also the subject of another article in Canada, which referenced an airline implementing the software.  The interesting thing about this example is that it mentions the return on investment from just two ideas:

WestJet has implemented a number of employees ideas, including getting rid of ticket jackets – which saves about $700,000 a year – and making the employee standby travel line automated, rather than going through the call centre. Tilbury says that reduces costs by about $1 million a year and freed up the centre by removing about 18 per cent of its calls.

You can read more about the Wall Street article here and the full story from Canada here.

 

by Roger Dennis

Immersion, reality, zombies and fitness

The wonderful London gaming studio Six to Start is working on a project that has been funded by Kickstarter. It’s a game called Zombies, Run!, and is an augmented audio running game for the iPhone, iPod Touch and Android that challenges users to rebuild civilization after a zombie apocalypse by completing location-specific tasks while running in the real world.

Users cue the app and don headphones to collect medicine, ammo, batteries, and spare parts which can be used to build up and expand their base — all while getting orders, clues, and a story through their headphones. Missions last around 20-30 minutes and can be played in any city. The platform additionally records the distance, time, pace, and calories burned during all runs.

This is a wonderful mix of many interesting trends: crowdsourced funding, augmented reality, and mobile computing combining to create a game with real world goals.

via Augmented Audio Game Spurs Fitness By Immersing Runners In Zombie Infested World @PSFK.

by Roger Dennis

Article link: So you think you have a strategy

Just quickly, there’s a great short read on strategy at the London Business School Business Strategy Review.  It’s titled “So, you think you have a strategy” and here’s the highlights:

I often wonder why such bright CEOs and their deputies miss the most basic necessities of cogent and executable strategy. They fail because they:

  • Are not really making choices
  • Are stuck in the status quo
  • Have no relationship to value creation
  • Are mistaking objectives for strategy
  • Keep it a secret

The full article is here.

by Roger Dennis

How to find new experiences (HBR online article)

John Hagel III and John Seely Brown have a nice, readable piece on HBR today about how to actively increase serendipity in your life.  Their five tips are:

1. Audit and re-shape your social network.

2. Revise your conference calendar.

3. Get more out of your social gatherings.

4. Act out diverse facets of yourself.

5. Share an experience in an unfamiliar situation

My favourite tip is number one:

Scan the periphery of your social network and explore those “weak ties” — the people you may have met briefly and who come from very different environments. Who are some of the most diverse people on the periphery of your network that you might benefit from getting to know better? How could you use online social networks to reach out to people you have never even met but who are engaged in arenas adjacent to your own interests? Each week, resolve to introduce yourself to a friend of a friend on an online network who seems to be the most interesting and most different from you.

via Five Tips to Break Through Your Filter(s) – John Hagel III and John Seely Brown – John Hagel III and John Seely Brown – Harvard Business Review.

by Roger Dennis

Workshops and speakers

Recently I’ve been invited to a number of events, and made some observations that are relevant to my book Really Bad Workshops (and how to avoid them).

Firstly when organising a workshop, make sure that you spend some time coaching your speakers to ensure that their messages are in line with audience expectations.  If you’ve pitched a speaker to an audience the last thing you want is them turning up presenting something that they used last week on an entirely different audience.

If you get the chance, review speaker presentations and offer to help tune them.   Top of the list for review should be graphs and charts.  There is no surer way of curing insomnia than cramming charts full of extraneous information such as the reference for the data sources, ten trend lines and twenty data points over 25 years. In contrast if you concentrate on the key information on the chart the message is much stronger.

Speakers should not be given an hour to fill – a presentation or talk is far punchier if you leave the audience wanting for more, rather than shifting their weight uncomfortably hoping for the presenter to finish.  I usually ask presenters to go for twenty minutes.  If they are good they will stick to their time – if they’re not so good they still have ten extra minutes before the audience attention span starts to waiver.

Finally, never ever have your attendees sit in the same seats for two and half days.  Shake things up and get them to break out, go on field trips or even have lunch in another location a short walk away.

by Roger Dennis

Societal, technological and organisational change

Every so often I read something which stops me in my tracks.  “A Long-Wave Theory on Today’s Digital Revolution”  on the Booz & Co Strategy and Business site falls squarely into this category.

It’s an interview with historian Elin Whitney-Smith and has a range of insights that are worth sharing.   Whitney Smith has spent 30 years researching and refining her theory of economic progress as a series of information technology disruptions, drawing on studies of subjects as varied as digital media design, medieval gender relationships, and the extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene epoch.

Her theory is that:

There have been six information revolutions in human history. Each represents a major change in the organizational paradigm — a change in how people form themselves into groups.

  • The first was among hunter–gatherers just before the invention of agriculture;
  • second, the rise of counting and written language;
  • third, the fall of Rome;
  • fourth, the invention of the printing press;
  • fifth, the electric information revolution that accompanied trains, telegraph, and telephone; and sixth, the digital information revolution that we are now living through.

In the last three, the economics follow the same pattern: a long boom followed by a crash. Then a difficult and turbulent struggle begins. New ways of organizing emerge and the old ways, supported by established elites, fail.

This has close parallels with the theory of technology innovation as proposed to Ray Kurzweil, and has led him to propose his theory of ‘the singularity’ where humans and machines merge.  Kurzweil’s theory is that each technology wave – from the discovery of fire –  has happened successively faster.  Whitney-Smith makes a similar observation:

Throughout history, the time frame has gotten shorter. Among hunter–gatherers, it took thousands of years to make the transition to agriculture. From the fall of Rome to the press was almost 1,000 years. The printing press revolution took 220 years. The electric revolution [trains, telegraph, and telephone] took 110 years, and, as I count it, the digital revolution started about 50 years ago. So, in recent information revolutions, there is a kind of rule of halves.

According to Whitney-Smith this has wide ranging implications, including changes for organizations:

We’re just starting to see the organizational innovation of the second phase emerge. These new companies take the Internet for granted. They are designed by a generation that had access to computers from childhood. Businesses that are less bound by old forms of hierarchical authority, such as Facebook (where any engineer can modify any part of Facebook’s code base), are thriving. So are companies with massive line worker input such as the “open management”

…companies that use these new ways of organizing will out-compete the old. If the rule of halves still applies, we would expect this new information order to manifest itself by sometime around 2012.

This is supported by evidence that companies are already embracing a ‘co-creation’ framework rather than a top down approach.  For example I’m working with a number of forward-thinking clients on the deployment of Spigit  – an online idea management tool which empowers everyone in an organization (especially front-line workers).

Whitney-Smith’s theory also has implications on a global scale:

In the short run, it’s better to be a member of the elite in China than a college student elsewhere with free information access. But bottom-up innovation will always be more successful in the long run. Therefore, if China continues its closed information policy, its success won’t last because regular people won’t be able to innovate.

Last but not least, the theory weighs in on the importance of moving away from the core to look for changes at the periphery and the edges:

“Lasting innovation in an information revolution doesn’t come from the elite, or from people who already have access to wealth and authority. It comes from the edges…”