NESTA Connect

Paralysis by Analysis?

I really enjoyed the recent BBC Four documentary on the life and music of Quincy Jones, the legendary music producer who started out as a jazz trumpeter but subsequently worked with everyone from Ray Charles, to Frank Sinatra, to Michael Jackson to New Order.

When working with Michael Jackson on the Thriller album, which is still the best selling album of all time, he talked about how they only had 8 weeks to complete it, which is a miniscule timeframe by comparison with most albums. This deadline was due to the record label pressure based on the huge success of Billie Jean single. This meant that they had no choice but to deliver, so they didn't suffer from, as he puts it, "Paralysis by Analysis".

As someone who has spent a lot of time in music studios over the years, I'm very familiar with the onset of obsessiveness that can kick in at times when working on a track, trying to find the perfect snare drum sound or endlessly restructuring the arrangement. However the best tracks tend to happen quickly without too much fiddling. If you have to try too hard, it seldom works out well.

I think this translates to so many organisations and activities that suffer from analysis paralysis most of the time. So what I take away from this example is to set an immovable deadline, and tell everyone about it so there is no chance of asking for more time at the last a minute. And then build the buzz, the momentum, and pull out all the stops to deliver something as good as you possibly can.

Will you do me a favour?

A friend contacted me the other day and apologised for asking a favour of me at short notice. It got me thinking to how economists always bang on about transactions as if we are autonomous beings somehow rationally balancing resource needs, but ultimately I think favours might be a better word, and certainly a lot more human.

Apart from limited command-and-control type situations, people interact because they feel inclinded to do so because of some kind of trust relationship, however limited or limitless. Favours can be tiny or huge, financial or non. Transactions as a word is too cold and ignores the relationship between parties.

The RAND corporation did work on the prisoners dilemma that showed that tit for tat strategies seem to work best in most situations. i.e. tend towards acting altruistically unless it is not reciprocated. Isn't that how we respond to people when they ask a favour of us? Needless to say I agreed!

NLab Social Networks are no 'Moore'

I really enjoyed the nlabs conference on Thursday and thanks to Sue and the team for convening such an interesting crowd.

I was finally able to get off my chest about how social networks are starting to fulfil some of the fuctions that traditionally made cities great, such as the random interactions on city streets that we use to continually learn and modify our behaviour. Start of a longer conversation there I hope.

I think that online social networks are particularly useful for building relationships, not with people you know well already, but rather with people you don't know well yet, such as people you meet at conferences for example. And it's the 'strength of weak ties' that social networks enable that stimulate more interaction and ultimately innovation.

It was good to talk about some of these themes with a new crowd too. I was amazed that when I did the 'who knows Steve Moore test' that there were only a handful of Moorites in the audience. I kind of take it for granted these days in social media circles that they'll know Steve but there we go.

Anyway, all the videos and presentations will be available here pretty soon and worth skimming through, in particular Ken, who was on fine form I thought, but all contributions were really good.

Battle of the Brands

Noah Brier has recently set up a new site called Brand Tags that does what it says on the tin. If you ever wondered what others felt about Pepsi and a stack of other brands, you can find out by looking at its tag cloud.

More fun, though, is the Battle Mode - the idea that some brands are stronger than others. Thanks to his innovative use of web 2.0 technology, we have a collaborative (and user-generated) brand ranking.

Don't ask the experts, ask the students!

Interesting piece in today's FT about japanese innovation. In particular the advice of Yukinori Kida, owner of a small Toyko-based components business KDA, which employs 50 staff and made a profit of Y30m on sales of Y1bn last year.

"KDA spends a healthy 3 per cent of sales revenue on new product development. Mr Kida uses students as researchers, believing they are open-minded as well as cheaper: "University professors are strong on narrow subject areas, but if you need to study a problem from a new perspective, they are really not that good."

Why are some companies better at open innovation?

One of the nice things about this job is discovering intermediary organisations that are working to the same ends - to understand and promote open innovation.   I was at a Global Business Partnership Alliance (GBPA) workshop  recently where we explored the statement 'Innovation in the future will demand that historically adversarial relationships be replaced by co-operative relationships based on trust and openness.' I couldn't agree more and what was interesting is that GBPA go on to define the 'vital signs' of those companies well equipped to change their behaviour.  I sum these up as a kind of 'corporate empathy' which embraces good communications skills, habitual transparency and a commitment to partners' interests that is rare in today's dog-eat-dog world.  We looked at a case study - Chrysler's well-known supplier cost reduction exercise (SCORE).  The trouble is, I'm not convinced this is truly co-operative innovation.  Chrysler gives the competing suppliers a 'choice' of passing on all savings generated or keeping half of them, with a 'bearing' on the future relationship.  Sounds like Hobson's choice to me and if you're a hard-pressed small firm the odd $5m today can go a long way.  NESTA's Open Alchemy programme is, I like to think, a bit more forward-looking as it's about future profits not past costs and it's a bit more open-minded in that suppliers such as Oracle are on a level playing field with their clients such as BT or Pfizer. 

Hyper Island and Dare

A surprisingly recurrent question that I find myself asking about creative innovation at NESTA is "How do they do it in Sweden?". The Swedes seem to have a track record in good innovation practice.

So when Skillset launched their excellent Media Academy programme, which aims to nurture creative people for the new media sector, they drafted in Mattius Hanson from the wonderful Hyper Island.

I'm glad to say that the UK (notably Scotland) can hold its own too with Dare to be Digital having an equally successful record of getting talented people into industry - this time in games.