Some hope.  The Do’s turned out to be full on with 30 lectures in 3 days and loads of activities before (like Meditation) and after (like Norwegian pole-walking). More compelling though was talking to the 80 or so others who had made their way to a damp celtic corner from as far away as California and Finland. Each of these individuals that I spoke to had a fascinating story.

They were all doers and my diary’s filling up with post-do coffees in the coming weeks. Let me give you a flavour of the lectures – one tweet at a time.

Gav Thomson – What are we going to tell our kids? / Do it today

Bobette Buster – Great films are about transformation. Watching someone become fully alive or the living dead.

Shan Williams – £4m leaves Cardigan a year to the supermarkets. / We pay for water and electricity that we used to have ourselves.

Catherine Powell – Meditation makes us realise that we are much more than we think we are.

Chris Heathcoate – The future will be confusing. / Genetics is big data, humans are 3.3bn bits, a CD or a bookcase of information. / 1 gene determines whether you can smell asparagus in your wee.

Wilson Miner – What was your time-to-screen this morning? /The internet gives us 3 superpowers: Find anyone; Find Anything; Massive processing power.

Jane ni Dhulchaontigh – We adapt our houses, but not our stuff. / The hacker way is how a farm works.

James Victore – Ask for more time. Ask for more money. Ask for more creativity.

James Bridle – The Wikipedia article on the Iraq war and all its revisions fills 12 volumes, the equivalent of an encyclopaedia.

Joel Bukiewicz – All the marketing and packaging is just the furniture. If you don’t have good work you don’t have the house. / I’ll never have 50 employees but I would love to have spawned 50 new companies.

Ed Brown – I meet myself where ever I go.

Marion Deuchars – Every office should have a playdesk.

Tim Drake – the wisdoms of youth are openness to change, openness to people, action orientation and having fun. / Try going 24 hours without saying anything negative.

Brian Robertson – Evolution is smarter than you. / Organisations design themselves

Tim Smit – I have banned the word innovation. The real innovation is to remember trust / There’s only one answer to the question what’s your exit strategy? Death. / The most important word in the next 10 years will be beauty / The moment you put your life on the line you will success because it matters / Tell future truths.

Michael Acton-Smith – We were going to call Moshi Monsters Puzzle Monsters but that was too educational.

Robin Sloan – Leave fingerprints for the future.

Tom Herbert – The word companion comes from the french to break bread together. / Slowly risen bread has better flavour and is easier to digest.

Sasha Dichter – Try to decide each day not to be generous.

William Rosenzweig - Practice not doing and everything will fall into place. / Ways to practice not doing are to unplug, sit, listen, give, garden. / Writing your stories is a way of staring your bullshit in the face.

Mike Beeston - You need context time. / Doing and meaning need to be in balance. The dotcom crash was too much doing, not enough meaning. / Web 3.0 is about sensors.

Toshi Nakamura – Development agencies rarely ask people their opinion. / Are we helping?

Richard Askwith – How reckless are you prepared to be?

Andy Puddicombe – Take 10 minutes a day to do nothing.

Anne Felton – Dressing like you don’t care is a trend.

Sean Carasso – We are only boys. How can we be enemies?

Look these people up. They’re the future. Which brings me to where I started. When Tom Herbett offered to give away a few jars of 55 year old leaven (yeast mix) there was a rush and I missed out. Someone noticed my disappointment and later gave me his jar which I’m baking with now. I think life and work ought to be more like the Do Lectures.

David

ps the sourdough bread was fantastic.  Beginner’s luck no doubt.

]]> http://www.100open.com/2012/05/no-grazing-no-milk/feed/ 0 http://www.100open.com/2012/04/in-praise-of-paradox/ http://www.100open.com/2012/04/in-praise-of-paradox/#comments Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:23:34 +0000 Roland Harwood http://www.100open.com/?p=3522 I’ve always been fascinated by a good paradox. Whether it’s staring at the wonderfully impossible art of Esher, or trying to get get my head around an apparently 2 sided object which only has 1 – namely a Mobiustrip (which it really does by the way – try it).

As a student I learned more about how paradox is central to philosophy and mathematics and science, best exemplified by Bertrand Russell’s famous paradox – my favourite articulation of which goes as follows:

The barber shaves all the men in the village who don’t shave themselves. Assuming the previous statement is true, then who shaves the barber?

The answer is paradoxical in that if the barber doesn’t shave himself, then according to the first sentence he must shave himself, else he does shave himself then according to the first sentence he mustn’t shave himself, which again is paradoxical.

Anyway, I’ve never really thought of this fascination as much more than a trivial intellectual pleasure, but having just finished James Gleick’s ‘The Information – a history, a theory, a flood‘, I’ve been reminded not only of the beauty, but also the importance of a nice paradox. One example from the book which I hadn’t heard of before is Berry’s Paradox which can be described as follows.

Consider the following list of numbers which each consists of a number of words:

7 = seven = 1 word
56 = fifty six = 2 words
6,909 = six thousand nine hundred and nine = 6 words
X = the smallest number not nameable in less than 11 words = 10 words!

According to wikipedia “The Berry paradox states that arises because of systematic ambiguity in the word “definable”. In other formulations of the Berry paradox, such as one that instead reads: “…not nameable in less…” the term “nameable” is also one that has this systematic ambiguity. Terms of this kind give rise to vicious circle fallacies. Other terms with this type of ambiguity are: satisfiable, true, false, function, property, class, relation, cardinal, and ordinal.”

I find it fascinating that concepts like ‘true’ and ‘false’ consist of systematic ambiguity. We chase these concept every day of out lives and yet is it a futile race.

Anyway, what have all of these paradoxes got to do with open innovation which is what this blog is usually about. Well we’ve been thinking recently about how can we best codify what we do and it’s not always that easy. The one thing I would say we are good at is being comfortable with uncertainty. I often find it personally quite unsettling but basically the business of innovation is trying to navigate through uncertainty without passing judgement too early.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been sitting in a meeting where people want to (or want us to) pass judgement on whether something is a good idea or not, to which the answer is usually, we don’t know yet. Whenever faced with a binary choice – left/right, true/false, creative/technical, public/private, black/white – remember the answer is always ‘both’.

Similarly we run an exercise in workshops around breakthrough innovation where we invite people to figure out the underlying assumption behind an industry or a current business model, and then get them to flip the assumption and work up a new business model based on the inverted assumption. It’s amazing how often it yields really interesting results. For example recently we ran some innovation workshops around the Construction industry where one of the assumptions, in the UK at least, is that people would rather own their own home rather than rent. However flipping that assumption is not only both possible but also profitable – for instance the assumption that people would prefer to rent rather than own underlies the success of businesses such as Spotify and Zipcar.

Finally we ran some sessions with a major UK cancer charity a few years ago who have a vested interest in stopping smoking for obvious reasons. So when somebody in a workshop came up with the apparently crazy idea of cigarettes branded by the cancer charity, you could see them visible flinch at the prospect. However to their credit they didn’t close down this line of exploration too early and it quickly flipped into branded smoking cessation patches instead which ended up being one of the projects they ended up supporting.

Anyway, so perhaps staring at those Esher images as a kid was actually training the brain to be comfortable with paradoxes which in turn is helpful in being comfortable with apparently wrong or contradictory or crazy ideas, which in turn is necessary in unlocking innovation. As Søren Kierkegaard said “the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion.”

I was pleased to be invited to speak as part of the Unfinished Business School event series at OCADU in Toronto last week by by Michael Dila and Andrew Jenkins. I chose to talk about 100%Open Business Models & Mindsets and my slides are available to view (above). The video of the session is due to be online shortly too I believe and I’ll update this post then with the video embedded once it is available.

In summary, I talked about six mindsets which are essential when embracing a more open approach to business, with each illustrated by a case study from our recent experience. By way of brief conclusion I presented the open business model spiral which shows the spread of increasingly diverse number of business models from which we can profit through partnership.

There was an interesting and diverse crowd of people in attendance who asked lots of interesting (and difficult) questions and I enjoyed it a lot. If you are ever in Toronto then I’d urge you to check it out.

by Roland

“When people use the word innovation it’s probably a sign that there isn’t a lot of it about.” Russell Davies

The reason I don’t like the word is not because I don’t think innovation is important, but rather it means different things to different people/organisations and more importantly it forces people to focus on the wrong thing. Innovation is a process and a culture not an end state. By focusing on innovation as the output of a piece of work you are more than likely to fail. Rather innovation is a by-product of productive and engaged networks as Verna Allee so insightfully puts it.

I sometimes jokingly say that innovation is an affliction not a career choice. Nobody grows up wanting a career in innovation but it seems to be the final destination – just before full-blown entrepreneurship – for the insatiably curious, optimistic and possibly unreasonable. It’s a glorious personality defect that should be nurtured, not manufactured.

So has “innovation” ‘jumped the shark’? Is it time we need a new word to hang our hats to? If so, what should it be? In any case I’m not sure that would help much, but in the meantime I would like to see a more nuanced and a more human approach to innovation emerge. Else, we will just talk past each other in platitudes and we’ll all be none the wiser.

Thanks for reading my rant. Roland

All of the above still applies in spades, in particular the first two points. I’m currently fortunate to have a little time to reflect and thought I’d follow up with another post about some of what we’ve learned since then.

1. Articulate your vision and your values
We are seldom asked to do work because of a specific tools or technique or service. Rather I believe it is because we have a vision, an attitude and a dogged determination to make a better future one way or the other. The difficultly is always being clear on what that could be and try to articulate it as much as you can. It will only become more clear with practice. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves and others to have faith the process and keep on responding with relentless enthusiasm. One of our newest recruits asked us before she joined what our values are, which I thought was a great question (thanks Simone) for which we only had half an answer at the time, but I think we are getting there.

2. Make a feature of your flaws
Learning new stuff and boosting your skills is obviously great but at the same time it’s really hard to change your true nature. So make the most of it. We did some really interesting work with LEGO last year in partnership with the Graham Bishop from Hidden Gorilla who is a great guy and can’t help himself but challenge the status quo constantly. This can at times be difficult but I admire how he has transformed this into a new service he calls ‘Strategic Sparring’, basically allowing him to do what he does best. We haven’t branded our “flaws” but I think what made us square pegs in a round hole for the previous organisations we worked for, is now exactly why people want our help> So it’s back to point two from last year (above) about bringing your whole self to your work.

3. Give people (including yourself) a chance
As we’ve grown, we’ve started working with lots of partners and associates. I still standby the ‘trust your instincts’ point from last year when it comes to working with other people/organisations, but also have been surprised again and again that people have surpassed my expectations when we’ve asked them to work with us. And whilst it’s always good to refine your craft, it’s also great to scare yourself silly and keep on trying new stuff as well.

4. Don’t sell yourself too cheap
Brits don’t like talking about money. I don’t know why but it must be in the water or culture or something. But I’ve definitely learned that it is in nobody’s interest if you sell yourself too cheaply. A bargain or a fast buck can be seductive but neither work if you want to build long term value and relationships. It’s important to know your worth and be able to justify it. And fundamentally it comes down to naming a price and not undervaluing yourself or your client. Everyone will feel better for it in the long run and you do better work.

5. Stop predicting – build & iterate instead
Certainty/Schmertainty – prediction is so 90’s so beware the snake oil salesmen who promises you answers and solutions. David likes to say that at 100%Open we are deeply shallow in that we know a little about a lot (rather than vice versa) and are fond of a catchy title. Whilst we need to know enough about a subject to understand the context and some of the jargon it’s liberating to tell people we don’t know the answer to their questions. It feels almost heretical to say it, and yet it’s true. Instead what we offer is an approach, the confidence to ask Big Dumb Question and some good tools.

6. Take time out to reflect
This year, I’m determined to take more time out to reflect on what we are learning. I don’t book holidays early and I really should*! However I’m pleased that David and I (the co-founders) are off to the Do Lectures in April which I’m really looking forward to and it will be the first time since before xmas that we’ll have had more than a snatched conversation between meetings or deadlines. We don’t do this often enough. And a top tip re holiday’s I got from Rohan to allow you to take proper time out is to get your partner/friend to change the password on your computers/phones/devices whilst you are away else you’ll never switch off.

Anyway, that’s it for now. We are understandably experiencing the growing pains of a still new business and are both figuring it out and making it up as we go along. I’m sure there are lots more lessons bubbling through but thought I’d share where we are at right now. And I’d be interested to know what have you learned in the past year that surprised you?

*This is just a reminder to myself and a public indication to my family that I intend to do something about it this year. Hi Ju

by Roland

The event was co-curated by Duncan Wilson from Arup (See his post about the event here) and Andrew Sleigh who is an associate at 100%Open and currently working with us on our Home of the Future project with E.ON.

The following post are Andrews reflections from the event originally posted at his personal blog here.
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The theme of the event was “User makers and distributed production”. A subject difficult to encapsulate neatly, but covering areas such as:

- Open source hardware that can be hacked and customised post-design
- Low-cost prototyping tools (e.g. microprocessors and fabrication technology)
- Small-scale personalised production (e.g. digitally produced gifts)
- Remote, on-demand fabrication services (e.g. Shapeways)
- Emerging domestic fabrication technology
- Increased access to hi-tech manufacturing (e.g. printed circuit boards) in China

On Thursday night, we gathered at Arup’s offices in London for an evening of inspiration and networking to hear 18 lightning pitches from grassroots groups, startups, designers and technologists, SMEs and corporates. If you can imagine Ignite, Maker Faire and TED all rolled into one, you’d have a pretty good impression of the evening.

I can’t cover everything that was shared, but a number of themes emerged which I found interesting.

Shared workspaces drive innovation

While the new fabrication technologies (laser cutters, CNC machines, fabric and vinyl cutters, 3D printers, etc) are low-cost, they’re still beyond the means of most individuals. So, for hardcore makers, community workshops have become established as key hubs within the maker network

Mark Hatch, CEO of TechShop told us of their remarkable success in enabling innovation and enterprise in the US, by providing access to tools and a community of fellow makers. Everything from the world’s first self-balancing bar stool, to the DODOcase (Obama’s favoured iPad case, it seems). The sheer volume of startups that had emerged from TechShop’s workshops was astounding.

We don’t have any TechShops (yet) in the UK, but we do have a wealth of hackspaces. One of the most pioneering is the London Hackspace Andy ‘Bob’ Brockhurst came along to talk about some of the projects that have found a home there. Spend an evening at LHS and you can have a DNA-sequenced curry from Brick Lane, and then try and sneak your washing up past the Kinect-controlled kitchen-sink plate-pile detector.

Every town should have a hackspace, fablab or TechShop – and they are springing up everywhere – but in some ways I’m more interested in how other work or play spaces might take on some of the functions and capabilities of a workshop. For example, schools are increasingly equipped with such machines, how about opening them up for experimentation beyond the confines of the school day and the school curriculum? I’m reminded of Phillip Torrone’s proposal to turn public libraries into hackspaces.

Xavier De Kestelier of Foster + Partners, shared his side-project, Smartgeometry, an online community of architects and designers, from practice, research and academia, that meets up once a year for a creative hothouse that pushes disciplines together for 5 days of intensive hacking and learning. I was particularly struck by the photos he showed of the workshop, where people were using computers and fabrication machinery in the same space.

I for one, would love to work in a space like this.

Designers are playing beyond the screen

Low cost micro-controllers like Arduino, wireless networking communication like RFID, and ‘well-hooked’ web services like Pachube or even Twitter are spurring a revolution in the design of physical objects and digital services. The two worlds are being brought together into an “internet of things”. Whilst that term can have many meanings, one facet is that of physical objects that are networked, and can share information about their status, sensors, etc.

For designers used to working with dumb lumps of matter, networked objects give them the opportunity to introduce intelligence (of a sort) and interactivity. For screen-based developers, the lure of tangibility is hard to resist.

Gonzalo Garcia-Perate, a PhD researcher at Arup Foresight, talked about Hintsights, a cloud service and table-top device that lets users access data streams in a domestic setting away from the computer screen. Project like this are endlessly fascinating to geeks (including me) but in a way I’m more excited by their domesticity than their hackability. Berg’s Little Printer hooks into a similar insight – the appetite for a friendly, physical, off-screen interface to networked data.

Greg Saul, from Diatom, showed off their Sketchchair project, which also has a digital and a physical component. Simple human-centred software for designing and manufacturing chairs, and remote, personalised fabrication. It’s clever in how it uses constraints to enable simplicity. The software is specialised to the task of designing a chair, complete with physics models and pose-able sitters. But doesn’t come laden with unnecessary features of a generalised 3D program. And the output is specific to the fabrication process, which uses a CNC machine to cut out planes of the charier, which can be shipped back to you and assembled into a finished chair.

Foundations of hardware innovation

Sketchchair was one of several projects that had received a kick start from Kickstarter, the crowd-funding platform. One of the others was Cesar Harada’s Protei project, an open source sailing drone that makes use of a flexible hull design to enable the vessel to carry heavy loads through the water, powered by wind. They hope this technology could change the way oil spills and other ocean waste is cleaned up.

Protei is built on open-hardware principles, and Cesar was quick to show how the network of interested hackers had improved their design and provided a community of support to help them gain backing and sustain the project.

One of the projects Bob Brockhurst talked about was Nanode, an open source derivation of the Arduino prototyping platform with built-in network connectivity. Started at LHS, they’ve now spun it out into a separate company. Again, an enterprise enabled by both open-source hardware and a community hackspace.

There is much more to be said on the subject, but these factors: crowd-funding, open source hardware, communities of hackers are, it seems, key of the foundations for innovation in hardware, particularly for hackers wanting to move into business.

Puzzles: Working at scale

These are all exciting, inspiring, optimistic themes, but I think it’s most interesting to look for the puzzles. And if I could draw the threads of the evening together into one puzzle, it would be:

How do you apply the creative forces behind the maker movement at scale?

Leo Poll of Philips Innovation Services, saw the potential of hacking for innovation when he came to the UK from the Netherlands (a country apparently constrained by regulations that hinder user-makers, and their ability to innovate, post-design). He made a call out for collaboration with grassroots makers within the enterprise.

Jane ni Dhulchaointigh shared with us the story of Sugru, the mouldable silicon putty for fixing and modifying things. Like many of the other projects we heard about, Sugru has grown organically, supported by the community, who love to share their experiences of the product. Sugru have a foothold in many diverse communities: engineers, photographers, gadget enthusiasts, etc. She wanted to know how she could raise her business to the next level, building support in much larger communities

And talking to some of the corporates there, like Fujitsu and Arup, it was clear that many larger enterprises are still working out how to incorporate hacking into their practice; how to bring back physical craft into design processes dominated by digital tools, how to hook up communities of external, non-corporate problem solvers with internal business units unused to looking outwards for help.

By Andrew
_______________________________

This event showcased so many interesting ideas, people and companies and reinforced our belief that the solutions are already out there, it’s just a case of spotting them and bringing the conversations together. We really enjoy hosting these events because they are fun, but also because we learn a lot, it keeps us on our toes and it makes good sense as well. The next event is on a totally different theme, namely the Business without Borders. We are keep to explore businesses or business models that are blurring organisational or geographic boundaries in new and interesting ways, and so are agile and responsive to an ever increasingly networked world. Thanks to all who came along and spoke at Union last week. See you next time, Roland

*The Union is an exclusive network of senior innovation professionals from primarily large organisations and from across all sectors. It is an informal network that was originally conceived in 2008 by Oracle and 100%Open and meet quarterly as a forum to share needs or innovation opportunities.

This is because what was previously seen as a gift has been turned into a market. The payment forces you to assess the value of the transaction and ultimately many people feel it’s not worth the bother. Also, it is more likely to attract people who are doing it just for the money which can negatively impact on the quality of blood donated.

Similarly, many large companies make the opposite mistake and take what is essentially an ideas marketplace and try to turn it into a gift. Namely they expect people to share ideas and work them up for them for free.

“For complex and creative tasks, financial incentives have a negative impact on performance.” Dan Pink

In our experience, money is never the primary motivator of external collaborators, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. Our rule of thumb is if people are sharing ‘just’ ideas, then there should be recognition and ideally rewards (which can be quite small). However if you are expecting people to ‘do some work’ then that effort needs to be repaid somehow.

If the ultimate reward is the opportunity to ‘do business together’ (the best incentive there is in our view) then you need to be really clear on the timing, process and criteria by which you will make a decision. Else, it’s impossible to be able to make an assessment of the risk verses potential reward.

So think carefully about whether you are in the business of reciprocal gift giving, or in the business of creating a marketplace. Don’t cheapen a gift by paying for it. And whilst open innovation at it’s best is about doing things better, cheaper and faster, it does not mean that you can get something for nothing.

By Roland

In 2010, we ran a pilot project, Power to the People, that engaged with over 1,000 E.ON customers. Last summer, we opened a new challenge focused on a particular business area, electric vehicles. Over 6 weeks, we worked with 1,600 customers who shared, developed and voted on over 700 ideas. The winning idea is now in development at E.ON.

Working with our technology partner, Chaordix we’ve developed an online platform for customers and employees to come together, share ideas and develop them into investable propositions. We nurture and manage and moderate the community, and harness the collective intelligence of users to rate ideas, and find those most likely to form the seeds of profitable, pioneering innovations.

We also work with SMEs and independent innovators through a private submissions route that allows them to share commercial ideas with us whilst retaining control of their IP.

Once the challenges are complete, we select the best ideas and work with E.ON’s innovation, customer insight and technical feasibility teams to develop these into commercial propositions.

On Sunday 12 February, we’re now rolling out the platform to an even bigger audience, as we launch Home of the Future, a set of 5 new innovation challenges tied in with Channel 4′s TV series of the same name, where a family from Sheffield have their lives transformed by cutting-edge technology, giving them a taste of how we all might be living the future.

We’re looking forward to working with an even bigger group of collaborators, ands we’d love you to join us too. Watch the show on Sunday night at 7pm, and then meet us online at www.eon-innovation.com.

See you there!

Andrew Sleigh

Most of our clients tend to be large companies and whilst I love them all dearly (honest!), I can’t hide the fact that many are really frustrating to work with as they can be very slow to make decisions, can be very political, have bureaucratic systems that nobody seems to understand, and more importantly squeeze out the fun and creativity out of people.

Small companies, on the other hand, can be wonderfully creative. As an entrepreneur you can wake up with an idea one morning and have implemented it by the end of the day, in ways unimaginable by big companies.

Big and clever?

However, as this recent article in the Economist argued, we must stop glorifying small companies and vilifying big companies. They both have an important role to play and increasingly need each other more than ever. However the article went on to make the case that big companies are more innovative than small companies for three reasons:

1. Only large companies can sustain the investment in building the ecosytems (such as Apple iPhone or Google Android) that are increasingly prevalent in our economies.

2. Globalization means we are all putting a premium on size like never before, and many competitors from emerging markets are backed by the state.

3. Most of the interesting and complex problems we face, such as global warming, require changes to complex systems where size really matters.

It’s certainly true that some big companies we work with have the vision, need and budgets to do some really interesting work in a way that a small company simply couldn’t even contemplate. Yet whilst I accept elements of all of the above points, I feel the above points miss several crucial bigger points.

“Everything big starts small.” Paal Smith-Meyer, LEGO

Firstly, Google and Apple wouldn’t have an ecosystem if it weren’t for small apps and technology developers. In fact, the are 4x as many Apps developers than there are Apple employees. Both large and small are inextricably linked in an ecosystem, and these days it’s the best eco-system that wins, not the best company.

Secondly, globalization putting a premium on size feels like a circular argument. Yes we are all playing on a bigger pitch, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t want and value local and personalized solutions. In fact, in the pharmaceutical world it is extremely well documented that the era of the blockbust drug is well and truly over and ‘the market’ is looking for more bespoke solutions.

Finally, whilst big companies definitely have an important role to play in solving some of the biggest and most complex issues we are faced with, historically we have seen again and again that the solutions to intractable problems often emerge from the periphery, not within large companies. Kodak’s recent demise is a start reminder of a big company who failed to spot the way the world was changing towards digital photography.

The new role for big business?

Big businesses certainly are not going away. It’s an economic and statistical certainty that some businesses will grow to be huge, whereas others will crash and burn. In fact we arguably need big business more than ever, but what for?

They used to be about delivering i) economies of scale ii) secure employment for many people and iii) in providing investment in infrastructure and equipment outwith the scope of smaller companies. These days only the third of those functions really still applies, and even that may be time limited.

“It’s not the big that eat the small… it’s the fast that eat the slow.” Laurence Haughton

I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that big companies really aren’t for doing R&D or for sparking creativity. They are about shining a spotlight on an opportunity or a market – they provide scale, aggregation, customer relationships and quality control. The rest, they should leave to the small guys, and source it from them. This is the toughest contemporty lesson for big companies – to realize that they can’t do it all.

Small companies are not only agile and creative, but also collaborative through through necessity rather than by design. They know they can’t do it all themselves and nor do they even try. However, their ultimate client may well be a large company who may want to license your product or even aquire it outright.

It makes my heart sink at the number of start-ups I see who sink an inordinate amount of time chasing expensive money rather than new clients. The best thing you can offer me (as a co-founder of a small company) is a paying client relationship, over an investor who needs to be managed.

Best of both worlds?

A nice recent example of where a large and small company have worked together for mutual benefit comes from a project we did nearly 3 years ago with Orange where we were looking for “The Next Orange Wednesdays.” See here for a more detailed description from one of the key instigators at Orange. And lo and behold we found one. A company called Last Second Tickets that was trading successfully in its own right but did not have the huge customer base that a mobile network operator such as Orange can offer.

By working together, and playing to their respective strengths, Orange found a big new brand proposition which is currently in the process of being launched regionally across the UK, with the national launch due in the spring. And Last Second Tickets for a huge new route to market for their excellent service (which hoovers up the spare capacity at entertainment venues – which there is in 95% of all performances – and sells it back to people at a discount on the day of performance). The new service is called Fun Finder and you can learn more about it here. We are proud to have helped make it happen and it’s a good example of playing to the best strengths of both big and small companies.

In summary, big businesses need small businesses to grow, survive and thrive. And small businesses need big businesses to scale and accelerate their innovations. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it’s not a question of who wins between big and small, “It’s the eco-system stupid”.

by Roland

photo credit: Rlefranc

In working on open innovation projects with large firms we’ve noted that far from people resenting being asked for their ideas, the opportunity to express their creativity is highly self-affirming. People often complain of being unfulfilled in their jobs, so in many ways the problem is the opposite.

She goes on to ask whether businesses can recreate social business systems so that they nurture a spirit of contribution. That’s exactly what we try to do when setting up internal innovation networks. There are at least three guidelines to this:

Firstly, incentivise and reward. These incentives could be bonuses, Amazon vouchers and exposure to senior management is very powerful.

Secondly ask people clear and important questions that will affect the company and their jobs. This is empowering.

Thirdly always actually do something with the winning ideas.

This whole question is part a wider trend of course. There’s a new blending of work and personal selves that is irresistible and this forms the backdrop to social business systems.

Done sensitively, internal ideas platforms can enrich both the company and the employee.