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.
Here at NESTA we're privileged to get exposed to lots of innovation "stuff" - (products, processes, services, people, connections).
It seems churlish not to try to share some of it, so here are some links to things that I like.
British Library Business and IP Centre
http://www.bl.uk/bipc/
A wonderful resource to help develop your innovative idea into a business. Check the vast library of patents and get some free advice. Alternatively, you can marvel in the gorgeous building - food for the soul and worth the ticket price to London if you don't live there.
Wii Hack. In a good way.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/245
Johnny Chung Lee shows TED a couple of innovative uses for a Wii remote.
I like this because:
- His hacks bring either social benefit or fun, or both.
- He's showing a lovely example of user-led innovation.
- At the end of the video clip, he makes the point that rapid dissemination (via YouTube), helped him take a prototype to a mainstream market in less than 6 months.
- Johnny's presenting at the rather wonderful TED conference.
Virtual Worlds and Kids. Some good news.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7415442.stm
A BBC story about the benefits kids can get from virtual worlds. The research makes a good point about asking users what they want - even if they're "just kids"!
My colleague Katherine Mathieson has written more on the subject of kids and innovation.
Apologies if you've seen any of these before. If so, your challenge is to post up your own favorite innovation stuff.
George Bernard Shaw is famous for having said "The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man." Perhaps one such example is the now long famous rise and fall of Shane Fanning, founder of Napster, who whilst still in his teens, pretty much destroyed or transformed the music industry, depending on your point of view.
Is this an example of, as David Albert Newman suggests of "pirating intellectual property ... for the good of society ... (if) this is a correction to dysfunctional markets"? This comment comes from a very interesting Harvard Business Review Online Forum entitled Who Owns Intellectual Property?, which nicely summarises the multiplicity of opinions about IP these days.
In creating new models of collaborative innovation, we are understandable continually hitting up against the IP issues and trying to figure out how to share risk and reward. I believe these issues are very closely related to the often ignored concept of trusted relationships between collaborators. I'm still not exactly sure of how things need to change, but I have no doubt that they must. Are current IP arrangements are a relic of 20th Century business and will they be increasingly subverted/irrelevant? Have a look at the HBS forum and see what you think.
I haven't posted in a while as I've been away so please bear with me as I get my blogging skates back on.
User-led innovation is possibly one of the hottest topics in innovation circles at the moment (to the extent that these things can conform to geometric shapes that is!). Nesta has been fortunate to host 2 of the leading people in this field in the last year, Eric Von Hippel and Karim Lakhani. Karim has a great case study of the T-shirt maker Threadless, who has a very active community of customers/designers/users who create new t-shirt designs, vote on the best ones, and then produce the best ones. And one of my favourite anecdotes from Eric is around the self injection of insulin. Once upon a time, as a diabetic, you had to go to a doctor every day to be injected with insulin. This was so in convenient to one 'user' that he trained to become a medical doctor for 7 years so that he could inject himself. Hence, self injection of insulin was borne.
I recently became aware of interesting CRC report by Darren Sharp & Mandy Salomon available here hich investigates the major drivers of user-led innovation and shows how user-led practices generate business and social value through a major case study of the virtual world Second Life. This case study shows how in virtual worlds innovation and play occurs without paying a fee, seeking permission or adhering to set [cultural or institutional] paths which engenders ‘entrepreneurial optimism’ which in itself is a driver of innovation.
It seems even the Government and policy makers are interested with the 12th word in the Exec Summary of DIUS's new Innovation Nation White Paper being 'users'. Also, this morning we had David Cameron, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, speaking at Nesta talking of innovation in the post-bureaucratic age and championing the open source software development, collaborative innovation, and the role of citizens or users in innovation.
A common mis-conception is that users will somehow innovate for or with larger institutions, however I think the fact is that users first and foremost innovate for themselves, however there is scope and rationale for larger institutions to tap into their 'top 1%' - i.e. the fans of their brand/product or service to co-create value for both. There are still many issues yet to be resolved.
Given all of this excitement and activity I was surprised to hear Eric Von Hippel proudly describe himself as a 'former inventor, gone meta', by which what I think he means is a sole innovator who now studies the subject. In the UK, we think of the inventor as slightly eccentric and bothersome and yet are they making a come back via the guise of the user?
Nesta is also experimenting in this space developing user-led innovation pilots in a diverse range of different fields ranging from Mental Health Services, to a pilot programme we are developing with Virgin Atlantic. As users rise in prominence and importance, and the tools become democratised, we need the business models and culture that taps into the innovations, wherever they arise.
I'm really pleased to showcase a new programme called Social Innovation Camp , taking place on April 4th-6th, that Nesta are supporting in partnership with the Young Foundation. The idea came to us from Paul Miller (School of Everything), Dan McQuillan (Make Your Mark) and Christian Ahlert (Open Business) inspired in part by Netsquared in the US. The event blurb is as follows:
What happens when you get a bunch of hackers and social innovators together, give them a set of social problems and only 48 hours to solve them? We’re going to find out. In London between 4th-6th April 2008, Social Innovation Camp will bring together some of the best of the UK and Europe’s web developers and designers with people at the sharp end of social problems. Our aim is find ways that easy-to-build web 2.0 tools can be used to develop solutions to social challenges.
This feeds into a wider group of Connect projects we are developing and supporting around innovation clusters that harness the participatory culture of the web focusing upon the social or creative economies, and I'll post more on this again as this evolves.
This week's Global Business programme on the BBC's World Service is all about user-led innovation with reference to NESTA and with an extended interview with Eric Von Hippel, who spoke at the NESTA Connect launch. You can listen to it here.
In essence, he talks about what he describes as a revolution in innovation moving from in-house R&D (and marketing) departments, to users and customers. He draws out a series of implications for what this means for intellectual property right protection and business models. With the tools to innovate getting better/cheaper/easier (especially in the digital domain but increasingly in other areas as well) he describes his thesis of how innovation is being democratised.
